I am pretty sure that this is the first time a cattle herdman has received a bonus for carbon credits that has enabled him to put down as a deposit on his first house. Our man Kasango Murehwa Samkute and his family no longer needs to live in a wendy house in someones backyard.
This life transformation is as a result of the sale of carbon credits that I wrote about here. The professionals at Credible Carbon, the registry that handles this, managed to sell most of the credits to Nedbank which is a corporate that actually walks its talk.
The deal with Credible Carbon is that they pay half of the net income from these credits to my staff and half to me. I have bought cattle and pigs with my half. These animals will sequester more carbon until 2023 when we go through the carbon measurement process again.
My staff received a total of R273,000. Murehwa got the most by a significant margin because the cattle have done the most work on enabling the carbon sequestration.
As a reminder we are a very small farm. We sequestered 7,101 tons of CO2 over a 3 year period with a severely understocked farm (300 too few cattle) and 3 drought years. A return flight from Cape Town to London emits 2 tons of CO2. Imagine how many millions of tons of CO2 the big farmers in the fertile areas could sequester.
Yet conventional farming “wisdom” is that the only way to produce beef is by concentrating them in a feedlot and feed them grains, constant antibiotics and asthma drugs at life end to bulk them up in the last 38 days. This emits CO2 into the atmosphere every step of it’s inflammatory disease inducing way.
Imagine the tech giants who are now the most polluting industry in the world thanks to their data centres (read this fascinating article on the subject) decided to support regenerative agriculture instead of their technological solutions. It would mean that they would have to admit that nature is smarter than they are and that it knows best how to sequester carbon into the soil. All we have done on our farm is mimic nature.
My colleague Jonathan Abelheim did a very able job on this life cycle assessment which show that for each 1 kg of animal protein we produce there is a NEGATIVE 12.11 kgs of CO2 emitted. Please note that we cannot claim this to be carbon negative beef as we have sold the carbon credits and so the beef is carbon neutral.
A life cycle assessment looks at all the inputs and their CO2 footprint. To see Mr Abelheims work you need to click here Life Cycle Assessment (first draft) and here Farmer Angus Beef LCA Metadata
Thank you for supporting our regenerative agriculture project and for getting Murehwa his first home. Your food choices are binary. Your farmers are either regenerative or destructive, they are either sequestering or emitting carbon.
Angus
29 November 2020.
3 Responses
Great work!
Hi Angus, your good intentions are noted. I think that carbon capture and sequestration is a bit of a distraction & false solution to addressing climate change and biodiversity degradation. see some docs here https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/geoengineering/
Hello Michele
I totally agree with the biofuelwatch argument that geo engineering is a big mistake.
For you to confuse carbon sequestration through the grazing of pastures whilst producing beef with geo engineering is a major problem. Producing food for people whilst putting carbon into the soil is no distraction.
Angus