Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Most of the world‚ fertilizers are produced in large-scale, centralized facilities and then shipped to the emerging economies. Due to the long-distance transportation, most rural farmers pay 2-3 times the world price for imported, synthetic fertilizers, many of which acidify/degrade their soil long-term. Using technology, we help rural communities establish village-based, profitable fertilizer production utilizing locally available resources, biomass residues, and labor. Imagine small-scale, low-cost, and portable equipment that can be latched onto the back of tractors, donkey carts, and shipping containers, and be brought from farm to farm to process the locally available post-harvest agricultural residues in under 2 hours without the use of external energy/heat into a high-yield fertilizer that can improve farmers‚ yields by 30% and income by 50-100% and sequesters 1.7 tons/acre of CO2 equivalent. 

The core technology, developed as my PhD thesis at MIT (with 2 pending patents that our organization will license exclusively from MIT), utilizes a novel process called oxygen-lean torrefaction. Current biomass reactors and processes (such as composting) are either large-scale (100+ tons/day) or slow (taking weeks-months for composting). By building/testing a laboratory-scale reactor, we demonstrated our concept can simplify/downsize the biomass decomposition process 100 times, that is also at least 100 times faster compared to organic composting. This results in a carbon-rich intermediate that can retain nutrient/water better, and act as a liming agent to reverse soil acidity, resulting in higher yield. When applied to the soil, the carbon contained therein stays inert for hundreds of years, thereby achieving carbon mitigation.

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Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

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Mission Statement:

We develop technologies that allow decentralized production of agricultural commodities such as fertilizers. Seeing that many rural smallholder farmers pay 2-3 times the world price for imported, synthetic fertilizers due to the expensive logistical cost, we feel that this is wrong. We believe that our small-scale, low-cost, and village-based technology is capable of helping them access low-cost, high-performance fertilizers that, at the same input price that they are paying, can increase their harvest yield by up to 30% and income by 50-100%, at the same time restoring their soil health and sequestering 1.7 tons/acre of CO2 equivalent from the atmosphere. 

We further believe that fertilizer production, rather than done at a centralized, capital-intensive plant thousands of miles away, should be decentralized and local. Not only can this provide millions of distributed jobs and additional income in rural villages (rather than only in mega-cities), but this also allows fertilizer to be tailored specifically for the local agricultural context to maximize performance in soil health and crop growth. 

Finally, our organization cares deeply about global warming and actively contributes to carbon mitigation. However, we believe that we do not need to wait for government policies to make this happen, but can do so on our own terms by creating a profitable business that sequesters carbon into the soil at the same time: the more fertilizer that is produced using our technology, the more financially profitable we become, and the more CO2 is also sequestered into the soil simultaneously.

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Website of Kenyan pilot (Safi Organics): http://safi.strikingly.com