You’re listening to KABC 790. Unite and Heal America. This is your host, Matt Matern. And I’ve got Dr. Brian Von Herzen on the program today, I had the pleasure of listening to Brian at a lecture that I was auditing at Stanford, due to a prior guest, Dr. Wesley field, basically inviting me to the class where I had a chance to listen in and to a lot of great thinkers talking about the environment. So what a treat that was, and Brian gave an outstanding presentation.

So I asked him to be on the show. And here he is, he is the founder of the Climate Foundation. Brian’s background, went to Princeton, then went got his PhD at Caltech. So he’s slightly under educated, but you know, we’ll still have him on the show. Brian, its mission of the Climate Foundation is to regenerate life in the ocean using marine permaculture technology, and basically seaweed to the rest of ice, which would provide food feed for animals and fertilizer, as well as creating a blue carbon sink, which would essentially sequester carbon for potentially hundreds of years or more.

Brian recently won the X Prize for the work that he’s done. So Brian, without further ado, and I know there’s a lot of other things on your resume, but we’ll just kind of stick to the basics here to get you get you started. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Oh, thank you, Matt. It’s great to be here. And greetings from Queensland, Australia.

Yes, well describe for our listeners, the Marine permaculture technology that you have been developing, and what, what the importance of that is as far as a solution for the climate, as you described it. When I heard about it on the class, I thought, wow, this is this is kind of the silver bullet to or potentially certainly a very important development that could sequester, you know, just mega tons of carbon at Giga tons.

And maybe you could just tell our listeners a little bit about what what a gigaton is, and how many of those we need to sequester to kind of put us in a position where we’re in less danger of climate, climate change, getting out of control are more out of control than it already is.

Sure thing, Matt. Yes, here at the Climate Foundation, we’ve been on a odyssey of more than a dozen years to figure out some of these nutrient value chain gaps in the ocean, which is all about what you know, the climate disruption that we’re seeing the climate warming, 90% of it ends up in the ocean, in terms of warmer water near the surface.

And it turns out, if you’re a couple degrees warmer in the surface layers of the ocean, that’s a barrier to upwelling, and upwelling is what feeds the kelp forests from California to Washington, all the way to the Mexican border, and all the way down south here to the tip of Tasmania, Australia. And it turns out those kelp forests need to have that upwelling, in order for the nitrogen and the phosphorus to be supplied to the kelp forest and keep it healthy.

Sadly, in the last 100 years, we’ve seen not one but two destinations of the kelp forests just off California. I have some maps that go back to 1853 from the US Geodetic Survey that show a river of kelp half a kilometer wide extending from point Concepcion, all the way past the Mexican border. And does that river that continuous river of kelp was such an obstacle to the mariners of the 1800s that they could not actually get to Santa Barbara harbor without crossing this continuous river of kelp. So it was a navigational obstacle in the 1800s. If you can imagine that.

Yeah, it certainly I recall seeing that and thinking, wow, we really have a far a long way to go to to get back to that state. And I guess the question is, how can we get there? And what are the next steps?

Right? Well, it’s important to recognize that, you know, there was a farmer practices in the early 1900s That led to siltation runoff, less visibility in water, and that prevented those juvenile Celts from growing, which is, you know, by 1939. That same map, that Geodetic Survey map showed that the river had been broken up and we’d lost about a factor of 10 of kelp.

Now, what is not, perhaps widely perceived is that not only did it was there a shifting baseline to where no one alive today has a living memory of the kelp forests that were in the 1800s It’s an early 1900s. But since the year 2000, we’ve had a second decimation of the California State of California. And that is the water is too warm, the nutrient levels are too low, and the kelp forest has been wiped out by what’s been a resurgence of some sea urchins. It’s not really the sea urchins, but when the water gets warmer, they up regulate their metabolism.

They go from eating the apples that fall to the ground to the apple trees. And they pretty much buzzsaw the apple trees like beavers. And before you know that those kelp trees are gone, because they’ve just like eaten through them. Just the top one, one or two inches is enough for to lose that whole kelp tree. Wow.

So you know, I saw the work that you’re doing in the Philippines and in terms of creating kind of a kelp seed bed. And maybe you can describe that for us as to how that works.

Yes, in the Philippines, we’ve been developing a platform. So I’ll just say that with marine permaculture. First, it was recognizing that climate disruption was going to wipe out the seaweed forests of the planet, then realizing that if we could use renewable energy, like marine solar energy wave and wind energy, to restore that natural upwelling, we can actually help to regenerate those kelp forest ecosystem services offshore.

Now, if you try to grow an acre of kelp, like my friends are trying in Santa Barbara. It’s taken them more than a dozen years to try to get permits from 17 state and federal agencies to actually get a permit to do a lowly acre of kelp near shore, which is daunting, and they still haven’t gotten all their permits yet. So I mean, it’s daunting. And that’s one reason you know, it took us six weeks to get those permits in the Philippines because there’s a quarter million seaweed farmers out here they know where the good stuff is.

95% of the seaweed that’s grown is grown here in Asia, and it’s a $20 billion market later this decade. So we need America to get back on track with this program. And that means facilitating and expediting, what we’ve done is we’ve actually designed marine permaculture vessels, which are substrate platforms and irrigation systems that enable a barge or a vessel to operate on the seven seas, and actually be registered with the Coast Guard and operate as a vessel.

And it turns out, the only thing older than real estate law is probably maritime law, you can go back 500 years, and identify there’s a right of safe passage for all Commonwealth vessels. And we you know, exercised across the Pacific all the way back to the UK.

So 500 years of admiralty law is great precedent to say there’s the right of safe passage, there are no inputs, and so many benefits with regenerating these kelp forest ecosystem services offshore, that marine permaculture vessels is going to be a wave of the future that really cuts through a lot of the bureaucracy.

We register with the Coast Guards, we operate these vessels under the laws of navigation. And you know, and we can sail the seven seas. And that’s really a key opportunity for us going forward.

So how much does it cost to create a vessel like you’ve created to start these permaculture I guess forests or mini forests?

Well, today, it’s really expensive. I think we just raised a million dollars to build our first 10th of a hectare here in the Western Pacific. And that’s great. And with that in place, when we hit that milestone, we’ve got the first million pledged with wonderful private philanthropy out of Los Angeles, the woca Foundation has pledged a million dollars towards the 3 million will need to build the very first sector.

Now a lot of that is the non recurring engineering, you know, knowing what works and what doesn’t. I just saw an interview with Elon Musk and his first three SpaceX rockets failed. And if he didn’t, like get the fourth one working, they would have been bankrupt. But they got the fourth one working. And this is the kind of engineering trials and tribulations you have to go through to get this stuff working.

Now it turns out, there’s a law called Rights law that does a better job of predicting the cost reductions with volume, then even Moore’s Law does, you may be familiar with Moore’s Law for semiconductors, the more you make, the cheaper they get, etc. Well, it turns out Rights Law does a better job of predicting that and a better job of predicting the 90% cost reduction of marine solar. I mean, I’ve sold her platforms that we’ve seen in the last decade.

So we are we are plotting Rights Law for marine permaculture area under irrigation. And while the first tech terrorists gonna cost us 3 million, once we get past a dozen hectares, it’s down below a million per hectare, and that’s two and a half acres. And as we get out to 100 hectares, it drops to a half a million, we get to 1000 hectares it drops to a third of a million.

So these declining costs and increasing revenues are exactly what we’re going to do to build the marine permaculture industry globally and have a marine permaculture alliance of people that want to develop hectares of kelp from the coast of California to the tip of South Africa to Europe and you know, and the Middle East.

That’s a pretty exciting potential future and We’re listening, you’re listening to KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host, and we’ll be back in just a minute to talk to Dr. Brian von Herzen regarding these issues and how marine permaculture technology may change the world in so many different ways in the coming years, so stay tuned and we’ll be right back.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and I am back with Dr. Brian Von Herzen. And Doctor, I just wanted to ask you a bit about well, why why? Why are you developing these platforms to develop the or to grow the marine permaculture as opposed to you said in the Philippines there are there are farmers that are growing it without platforms?

Yes, well, I’d say since the 80s and 90s. There’s more than a quarter million seaweed farmers in the Philippines and two and a half million or more farmers in Indonesia, who’ve been making their livelihoods in seaweed communities really growing the seaweed, nearshore and offshore. The problem is, in the last decades, it was going pretty well in the 80s. But since then, the water has been getting warmer and warmer.

Literally, you know, it was getting bad when it got up to 86. In the summertime, now it’s exceeding 90 degrees in the summertime, locally in the Philippines. And the walk the seaweed just starts melting. I mean, literally, that’s the term that our local Philippine staff are using that, you know, in the middle of summer, the seaweed just starts melting, like disappearing, the water is too warm, the nutrients levels are too low.

There’s a syndrome called Ice Ice where it loses all its color kind of goes blanched. And then pretty much it’s on a road to death after that. So it’s a severe problem. And we realized that you know, the deep cold water with the higher nutrients was available, just couple 100 meters down. And if we can just get nature’s natural upwelling system going again, because that energy barrier with warm water is too great. restoring natural upwelling with marine solar wave and wind energy. We could actually get the seaweed production back on track.

And it’s like bringing irrigation to farmland, you know, you’ve got dry cropping. We all know how that does. But if you irrigate your farmland, you can get to for even 10 times more production than you would get under dry farmland. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the seaweed community. This time, the irrigation is with deep water and it’s to provide those cool nutrients back to the seaweed so they can grow. So that’s the first area where seaweeds are.

The seaweed growth is challenged. The second is, you know, December 5, December 17. Last year, just a few months ago, we experienced category five hurricane super typhoon, right, went flying right through the central part of the Philippines and took out all the farms in the central Philippines, except for ours. Wow. And that was something that blew us away.

We put our platform just five meters below the surface. And we thought it might work. We never tested it right. And we had 15 foot waves. And we had 120 knot winds hitting our platform directly. And not only did the platform survive intact, but most of the seaweed was still running.

That’s incredible. That’s incredible.

The next week, we were actually growing seaweed again, you know, and these other places, it’s been four months, and they haven’t even had any seedlings to start their farms again. So we actually delivered a quarter ton of red seaweed seedlings to our neighboring communities across the Central. This is the central part of the Philippines to provide these farmers with the seedlings they would need to grow their crops again.

It’s been it’s been like almost half a year and they still want to have them and just today I got another request for more seedlings to go out. So we have been in the diaspora, if you will, the the way to get the farming back on track because we had a farm that survived.

That’s great and great community service there helping your neighbors to get Get their farms back up and running. So that’s kind of fascinating. So essentially, by just pulling your platform further away from the shore, you’re getting the cooler water. And the cooler water feeds the plants more effectively, and you’re able to grow when your neighbors are having problems with warmer water. How would you? How would you say we should use this technology here in the US?

And and would you need the same permitting because of the Law of the Sea, as you described? If you’re out far enough, I guess or if you’re if you’re not attaching to the, to the floor of the ocean, would you still need permitting because you’re kind of a, as you said, a boat or ship.

We’ve actually briefed the Coast Guard twice now on the marine permaculture vessels. And they’re, they’re interested and cooperative. And so we’re very enthusiastic to to make that work. offshore. It’s great because everywhere offshore in water of 100 meters and deeper, you’ve got access to deep water, nutrients and cool water, which is exactly what the kelp forests needs.

And I’ll tell you, when I look at the maps from Northern California, all the way to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, the decimation of most of the kelp is just heartbreaking. I mean, the near sisters, kelp forest is more than 90% gone. And it’s not coming back to 99% of the sea urchin barrens, you know, has been addressed. It’s been an ecosystem shift. And we’ve just lost you know, a few years ago, I used to go out with my buddies, and we’d go freediving through the kelp forest and get abalone. You know, firstly you get four abalone they can get to they can only get one.

And now the kelp forest is gone. That’s the food for the abalone. So there is no more abalone to you know, harvesting or collecting allowed. And you know, back in the 1950s when my father was growing up in San Diego, he was getting his PhD at Scripps and oceanography. He could get abalone off La Jolla. You know, that’s how much it’s changed.

Right? There’s a place in Pallas Verdi’s called abalone Cove. And there was a lot of abalone there. And now it’s, I believe, pretty much decimated.

So those were the Sea Hunt days and you know, half of it is the abalone would be okay, and they can be sustainably fished by, you know, by recreational fishermen. If, if we have the kelp forest, but the kelp forest is a home to so many species, you know, they say the coral reef is actually home to a quarter of all marine species. And you could say something similar for the kelp forests and the seaweed wars because you’ve got invertebrates, you’ve got fish habitat, we see 1000s of sardines, hundreds of tuna, dozens of dolphins and even a whale shark showed up last year on our platform for three days.

That’s incredible. So tell us a little bit about this XPrize victory and what what does that entail? And why did you win? And how did you win? And what’s the next step after winning this level of the XPRIZE? For you?

Sure thing that yeah, we we documented the performance of our 100 square meter marine permaculture platform and its ability to grow seaweed to rescue production. And it turns out the seaweed falling off the platform sinks 1000 meters a day into the deep ocean where it takes all this carbon with it. And that net carbon export is enormous. I think it’s it could exceed 10,000 tons per square kilometer per year.

And that’s a huge amount when you consider there’s 100 million square kilometers of mostly empty Ocean between you and me right now subtropical ocean that is amenable to marine permaculture. And if we use less than 1%, one ocean, we can feed billions of people who depend on the ocean for their food security, regenerate life in the ocean, and be able to export on the order of a giga ton of carbon dioxide each year.

And how much is a giga ton? And how many giga tons do we need to sequester to really make a difference here?

Well, today, humanity puts out like 40 Giga tons of carbon dioxide each year, which is a lot. We’ve got to decarbonize and that means, you know, 80 plus percent of our carbon emissions and our greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, everything else has to be decarbonized. We have to go to electric, we have to really transform our economy for 80% decarbonisation.

Now, humanity’s put up 1500 Giga tons in the atmosphere over the last 200 years. And what we have to do is draw down the rest, you know, we have to actually first of all decarbonize as a first step. Secondly, drawdown using technologies like rain permaculture, see forestation, improving our soils to retain more carbon and an enabling those soil microbial communities to do what they’ve been doing for eons and that is rebuilding the humus, the recalcitrant carbon that’s in the soil to actually improve productivity and, and effectively enable decades if not centuries of fixation of carbon in our soils across America.

So how does the the seaweed forest and marine permaculture that you’re talking about creating compare with growing trees and the sequestration of carbon? Is? Is the kelp forest even more effective at sequestering carbon than then growing a forest of trees?

Well, it is in this following poignant sense he might have remembered in the last two or three years, the terrible wildfires we’ve had here in Australia in 2019, and 2020, and California, California, Washington, British Columbia. I mean, at the end of the day, the infrastructure we put into sea forestation into marine permaculture. reforesting of those killed off shore.

At the end of the day, those kelp forests don’t burn. And that means if we’re going to store you know, the the carbon grows really fast. Probably we fixed more carbon in a square meter of kelp forests and even the Amazon rainforest each year. And so those kelp forests are incredible carbon sponges, if you will, the fraction of the kelp that falls off the platform and sinks like leaves falling to the forest floor, this Capitol sink 1000 meters a day into onto the seafloor.

And that’s true for a lot of our sinking seaweeds and even kelps that they’ve tested at USC. it in one day, it’s down and it’s sequestered in the abyssal waters for many centuries at a depth of 1000 meters and greater.

Well that I believe answered the question that kelp is even a more effective sequestration device for for carbon then. Then trees are so maybe we should be planning even more of it. You’re listening to KABC and night and heal America. This is Matt Matern, and we’ll be right back and talking to Dr. Brian Von Herzen. So stay tuned.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790 This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’m back with Brian Von Herzen. Brian, we were just talking about this amazing technology of the marine permaculture and I’m wondering, how can it be rolled out faster, and also want to kind of circle back to the XPrize and what the next level is and what you’re shooting for in terms of prize money as well as technological progress to move this technology further and faster.

Sure thing that the growth of marine permaculture it’s like investing in a solar irrigation system, it takes capital to build out this infrastructure. And that’s what we’re looking to prove out. First of all, the first sector we build is going to be economically sustainable.

And then that we can build franchises of marine permaculture all over the world with a marine permaculture alliance that can enable it to scale hectare by hectare from family farms where you just want to, you know, have your family cultivate a hectare and sustainably grow out and help the ecosystems at the same time with fish habitat to the seaweed communities in the Philippines and Indonesia, that depend on the seaweeds for their sustenance and livelihoods and enable them to really survive these dual ravages of climate disruption that they’re dealing with, right presently with the warm water and with 22 hurricanes a year that on average that hit the Philippines area. So it’s a big challenge. Go ahead.

So what’s the what’s the next level, the XPrize that is available to you and to others?

Well, there’s, with the milestones awards in place as of this Earth Day, it’s now literally 1000 days more or less to develop the The solutions that can enter into the grand prize. And of course, the grand prize is open to everyone. So not just the milestone prize winners. But what we need to do is build systems that can sink more than 1000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from between February 2024 and February 2025.

That’s the one year performance time period, that we have to demonstrate that our scale systems can sink more than 1000 tons of carbon dioxide, and then enter that data for the grand prize of $50 million that will come out on Earth Day 2025. So it’s a grand challenge, if you will, there are going to be second and third prizes of 20 and $10 million, I believe.

So that means the total XPrize for carbon removal $100 million prize, which is the largest prize in history. And we’re looking forward to raising up to 25 million for us to build the industry and bid on the winning entry for the $50 million price.

So how many systems will you have to put in place by February 2024, in order to sequester that 1000 tonnes of carbon within that next year?

We think it may require more than a dozen hectare size systems. So it means we’re on a bit of a Apollo mission, if you will, and to scale. And we’ve done it before with American ingenuity and know how, and we can do it again with partners from all around the world.

So who are your partners and describe kind of your plan for us to roll this out?

Well, not only do we have multiple foundations like the woca Foundation that have been incredible at providing essential support in enabling the technology to move from technology readiness level one, according to NASA, which is basically an idea up to TRL seven, which is basically system running in the water. And TRL. Nine is when we got that commercial sector running, we’re deploying multiple actors and all the rest.

So it’s been a real odyssey. We’re really happy to have partners, including Princeton University, who’s helped to validate the carbon sequestration in the biogeochemistry. We have partners at the University of California, San Francisco, and their their center Facilier construction. It’s a National Science Foundation Center that is sponsoring some of our work to actually understand how can we grow kelp and adapt it offshore California and this is macrocystis, the canopy giant kelp that we see off the off the shores in central California today.

How can we adapt it to serve the needs of agriculture better in particular, turns out up in Nova Scotia and elsewhere, see cows go down to the beach, and they eat seaweed all by themselves. There was this farmer up there that had his land split by a road it was on the coast. And half of this pasture was landlocked, and half of it was on the beach. And so it turned out the cows that were on the beach, were they grew bigger, they were healthier.

And some say they were happier. And that’s because they had CBD all the seaweed they wanted. So it turns out that that happens even with the deer down in New Zealand because they come down to the beach at night and eat seaweed as well. So there’s a natural percentage of a few percent seaweed that these ruminant livestock want to have because it actually reduces the burps. It reduces the belches it reduces the methane. And you know, 11% of all feed energy that goes into a ruminant livestock, like dairy cows goes up in smoke as methane. I mean, that’s 11% of the energy of that food value.

So if you put a cork in it, and you actually don’t, you know, you hope that last stage in Japan agenesis. Using a bit of seaweed supplement, you’ve got most of that energy available for the cow. So some of it actually goes into improve production, and then others might go out the back end. But the point is, if you can actually demonstrate a feed conversion ratio improvement, at the same time that we’re cutting most of the methane of these enteric methane emissions of ruminant livestock, we can address what I’m going to call the first gear in, in getting us back to a healthy climate.

And that’s because this year’s methane emissions are going to do more to contribute to the next 20 years of warming than this year’s carbon dioxide. So if there’s anything we do, let’s cut our methane emissions first, and get the warming rate down and then we can start addressing some of the carbon dioxide.

So that part of the equation may be as valuable or more valuable than the carbon sequestration of the kelp because feeding these livestock animals, the kelp and reducing their emissions by 10% or more wood It, you know, be a very substantial move in the right direction, because we know that that livestock is contributing a very substantial portion of our methane production or I guess output whatever you want to call it.

So what’s the what’s the timeframe in terms of getting getting that commercially available in terms of in products that farmers can give their their animals getting the seaweed into the feed stack. But we are actually doing a Crowdfunder right now on our website, climate foundation.org, to raise enough funds to build the first pilot scale marine permaculture in the Americas.

And that is repatriating American technology back to America. And so that works at a pilot scale, and then build a hectare, and then feed the calves. So it’s like, we do it all in parallel. But that Crowdfunder basically, if we get enough support for our Santa Barbara Channel, crowd funder for Southern California, to actually do this pilot this year, we’ll be able to launch a pilot experimental program next year.

And I’m happy to say that every dollar that goes in gets matched by our private philanthropies and contributors that have pledged these amounts. And so it means that there’s leverage as well. And if we can raise the several 100,000 that will be required this year, we’ll be able to deploy that platform in 2023. Get it measured by our colleagues at UCSB and elsewhere, and have this pave the way to regenerating our kelp forest ecosystem services offshore California, that we’ve lost, like two orders of magnitude over the past 100 years.

So in terms of this project, and the crowdfunder where can the listeners find this and and how could they contribute to to the work that you’re doing on on this project?

Well, it’s right at climatefoundation.org at our website, and there’s some donate buttons on the top right. And every dollar that goes in is gonna get matched dollar for dollar. And that’s this is the kind of public grassroots support that is going to save the day. With respect to kelp forests off California, all the way up to the Canadian border where we’re seeing the 50% of the macrocystis kelp forests last.

I was just visiting the Monterey Aquarium recently and and you can see a bit of kelp around kelp forests around the aquarium and there’s so much wildlife up there with seals and and all kinds of other marine mammals swimming around. But unfortunately, the rest of California does not have that same level of kelp forest stration.

That is so true. And you know, I’ve got to share a short story with you and that is that Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture, back in the 1960s was actually doing his ecological training in the kelp forest off Tasmania. And it was that understanding of the relationship between the seabirds, and the marine mammals and the kelp forest and the fish that he applied to the rainforest of Tasmania and really discovered and developed this field of permaculture as we know it today.

So this is going from sea to land back to sea. Again, when we bring marine permaculture back to the sea and say, let’s apply these design principles to the ocean and our ocean forests.

Well, there doesn’t seem to be many things that are more important than this in terms of saving our ocean and saving our planet that those two are just tied together hand in hand. So you’ve been listening to KABC 790. And this is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America. We’ll be back in just one minute with our guests, Brian Von Herzen and we’ll talk into more about how we can save our planet.

As you may know your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you, or 84465449688446544968.

You’re listening to KABC 790, This is Matt Matern, a host of Unite and Heal America. And I’ve got Brian Von Herzen on the program. And Brian, we were talking a little bit offline about biostimulants. And the value that the kelp has that could deploy could replace some of the To fertilize the fertilizers that are currently being used, which are very destructive to the environment. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that the nitrogen based fertilizers.
Sure thing. You know, I’ve learned a few years ago that Napa Valley Vineyards wouldn’t think of doing business without seaweed, fully your biostimulants, which act like a multiplier to the fertilizer you put on, it’s really interesting because what I’ve learned is when you spray this biostimulant, and it’s literally like, one quart, for two acres, you know, the the application rates really low. It actually goes on the leaves of the plants in the morning, it goes through the stomata of the leaves.

And these plant growth regulators actually up regulate the gene expression of the plants, which means they uptake the existing nitrates in the existing phosphate more efficiently than they would otherwise. What it means is that farmers across America can use 20% less fertilizer and get the same yields if they use seaweed or biostimulants.

Now, this has profound effects, you might have noticed the doubling tripling and quadrupling of the price of nitrate fertilizer, just in the last 12 months.

Well, that also has the added benefit that creating these fertilizers takes greenhouse gases to create them. And they’re very energy. You know, it’s a very energy expensive process, right?

It does, you know, you’ve got to burn a lot of fossil fuel to make nitrate fertilizer. And furthermore, with this intervention, if you if we use the biostimulants, which are currently only 3% adopted across America, mainly for high value crops, like let’s say, vineyards and tomatoes, but this it applies equally well to any fruiting crops.

So any any flowering crop, even the row crops could potentially benefit, we see great results of 15 to 30% yield increases on rice fields. And that’s so important in the Philippines. So the opportunity is to effectively cut your fertilizer used by 20%, maintain yields.

And that cuts runoff by 20%. And it cuts nitrous oxide emitted by the soil by 20%. And nitrous oxide is probably the third most important greenhouse gas. And it has 300 times the greenhouse gas potential of carbon dioxide.

Wow. So you know, one of the things that I had heard you talk about before, which was the the rice fields being submerged, and the amount of methane that gets produced when, when you’re farming rice underwater?

How could this technology affect that there are improved methods, including the system for rice and intensification that spends little or no time having the ground submerged, because when it’s submerged, it loses oxygen, and then it starts producing methane. And so if we go instead, with these alternative best practice methods, we can cut the amount of methane produced on rice fields, maybe by a factor of 10.

And that coupled with being able to take out 50 to 90% of the enteric methane emissions of ruminant livestock mean that we can actually be nailing, perhaps 40% of those emissions that are occurring because of our agricultural practices, just for those interventions, right?

Plus the amount of water that’s used in flooding a rice field is probably not the most efficient and best use of all that clean water, right?

There are a lot of improvements like that. Yes. And I think applying permaculture principles to really move towards lower applications of fertilizer, we, you know, we had the granite Green Revolution, which was kind of better lived through chemistry for soils, but it completely ignored the healthy microbial communities that are vital to soil thriving.

And it turns out, if we focus on those healthy soil microbial communities that include compost, it includes living soil, really cutting, you know, glyphosate as an antibiotic. And so if you actually cut your glyphosate, you can actually enable your soils to start living again. And as those living saw communities that fix tons of carbon every year per acre, and that’s an opportunity to get life back on track and the soils as well as the seas.

And we see this virtuous cycle of a seaweed polar biostimulants, moving from the sea to agricultural crops, improving life in the soils, and that reduces runoff that goes right back to the sea, with healthy sea forests and kelp forests.

I am wanting to know how quickly we can get this commercially available. I mean, some of it obviously is commercially available because it’s being used on certain crops already, but to get it used more widely, so that we can have the positive effects that you just described.

Well, I think we can take our 29, our 30 million acres of lawn and start turning them into food for us. And on the way, we can actually be using seaweed pull your biostimulants to enable more flowers, more cropping and greater yields.

And then we can move from horticulture towards mainstream agriculture and get these practices adopted across our agriculture, with reduced fossil fuel intensity with greater yields, and ultimately, with the regeneration of the living soil. And that regeneration of living soil is going to be a key way that we’re going to be able to sink carbon into our soils as well as our seed.

So who’s who’s making these biostimulants? And are they making them at the scale that our planet really needs them?

They’re available in horticultural shops today, we make something called Big grow in the Philippines. And we’re looking forward to bringing that back to the US as well in the future, because tropical seaweeds have some unique benefits against drought, and, and heat resilience. And so I think we need to improve, increase the demand and increase the supply.

And we’re looking forward to doing that with partners across America. And I think by pulling out that green thumb and turning our lawns into food for us, we can go a long way towards moving moving in the right direction and eventually get it into mainstream agriculture. We’ve got 3% market penetration today of these biostimulants, we’ve got a long way to go that will make a sustainable future for all of humanity.

Well, it certainly would seem to make sense. you’d wonder why commercial farmers wouldn’t adapt this given that it does reduce the amount of fertilizer that they would have to use increase yields. Those things are just economic reasons that I would imagine farmers would want to move in that direction. Can the US Department of Agriculture also provide a pusher to support this process?

Well, that’s a great question, Matt. You know, I like to say I like to quote, The future’s here today is just not broadly distributed yet. And we’re really interested in making that happen first with early adopter farmers and then moving it into the mainstream.

And we’re interested in applying to USDA loans to actually really enable and accelerate this across California and across the states to transform, you know, our relationship with nature from one of extraction, to one of regeneration, I was amazed to learn that one of the first climate disruptions caused by humanity, were those great dust storms across the Midwest, you know, there was all this wheat planning in the early part of the 1900s.

And it was only by reading the recent books on this, that I realized, those Dustbowl storms were caused by over planting monocropping wheat and getting rid of the beautiful multi species ecosystem of that prairie. Similarly, we’ve learned how to work with nature, and that’s the principles of permaculture is really to find ways to sustainably harvest from the natural ecosystem, whether it’s a kelp forest, or a food for us that we might develop here.

Terrestrially that’s really the opportunity as we go forward. And that’s one reason we named it marine permaculture. But it’s because we’ve got to transform humanity’s relationship with nature, from extraction to regeneration.

Right. It’s, it’s a process that hasn’t quite taken hold, I see some some things that are happening, like what you’re doing is is amazing work. And I just would love to see it to expand more quickly, because I feel like we need it. And we need it urgently.

Usually, I think kind of we could look back and say, Well, eventually this technology will will win the day and we don’t have to push it the market will eventually adopted people eventually adopted but I don’t think we kind of have that luxury of saying let’s just the market take its sweet time to have this occur.

So the we need to stimulate the market in order to use these biostimulants and other types of technology you’re talking about.

Well, that’s exactly right, man. And that’s one reason we’re doing the Crowdfunder for California kelp, right now on the climate foundation.org website. And, you know, we like I’ve actually done the calculation and figured out that if we can triple the area under deepwater irrigation every year for the next dozen years, we’ll get to a gigatons of carbon dioxide fixation per year, which is an incredible goal. And I’m pretty much dedicating my life to doing it.

Well, it’s It’s remarkable work that you’re doing Doctor, really appreciate it. I think you’re really on the cutting edge and I certainly have been reading a lot about this. And I know that you were mentioned in rich recent book by John Doerr, which I’ve read his his book measure what matters and he’s an incredible management consultant.

And he’s also written that book speed and scale, which talks about all kinds of different things we should be doing to to effectuate change to save save the planet. And what’s your relationship with John and we’ve only got about 30 seconds. So I’ll let you end on that.

Sure. John has been a great supporter of marine permaculture really appreciate the mention and speed and scale. And he’s just given $1.1 billion to Stanford University to start a school in climate change. And I think these solutions from marine permaculture to forest regeneration on land is what it’s all about. That’s what we need to do is work with nature to make that work.

Well, great work, Doctor, and pleasure having you on the show and look forward to having you back to tell us more about the progress that you’re making and, and the great work that you’re doing. So thank you.

Thank you, Matt. It’s my pleasure.

You’re listening to KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America, and we will be back next week. So have a great week everyone.

As you may know your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.