Soil Heath and Zero Foodprint
Image courtesy of Zero Foodprint
We have been very busy lately, but I couldn’t let June pass without pausing to reflect on our first official year in business. In celebration of that milestone Knowles Architect Inc contributed 1% of our first year’s revenue to Zero Foodprint and committed to contribute 1% of future revenue to provide grants directly to farmers and ranchers ready to make changes to their land designed to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and re-store it underground as healthy soil.
Our guiding mission as a design firm is to help people connect with their place in the world and to help them make their place better over time. This means working with the local ecosystem on a micro scale and addressing the challenges of climate change through our built environment. While there are many opportunities for this in our work using healthy and carbon sequestering building materials (more on that in an upcoming post!), farmers have an even greater ability to sequester carbon while improving the health of their land.
Diagram courtesy of Zero Foodprint
Since launching the grant program in 2020, Zero Foodprint has funded projects with a modeled carbon benefit of over 97,000 CO2e. That’s the same as not burning 10.6 million gallons of gasoline. We are extremely proud to become the first architecture firm to join an organization where 95% of the money raised goes directly to supporting actual farmers practicing regenerative agriculture and active carbon sequestration.
Diagram courtesy of Zero Foodprint
Diagram courtesy of Zero Foodprint
Over the last 75 years the transition to industrial farming across much of the world has transformed the way we interact with the land in a profoundly negative way. Vast areas that once provided habitat and drew carbon out of the atmosphere now do the opposite, mostly to produce feed corn, using colossal amounts of nitrogen fertilizer which sterilizes the soil and leeches into watersheds. Nitrogen fertilizer which is produced from fossil fuels in a process originally invented as a means of creating explosives during WWI. Don’t even get me started on the #1 irrigated crop by land area in the US: the suburban lawn.
There is now abundant data showing how farming could be a critical way address the overabundance of carbon in the atmosphere by storing as much carbon in the soil as possible in the form of organic matter. This, of course, is critical not just for climate change, but just as importantly for sustaining the ability of our soil to feed us! This can be achieved by a plethora of techniques including the use of urban compost, and one of the most promising is the use of animals in Adaptive Multi-Paddock (AMP) grazing which intentionally mimics large herds of herbivores roaming the prairie. For more on this go check out the work of Carbon Nation including their Carbon Cowboys and Roots So Deep documentary series.
