Meet the carbon farmer Caroline Spencer talked to Glyn Mitchell about regenerative farming
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t sounds so obvious, so simple. You take food waste, you make compost from it instead of burning it, you regenerate the soil to grow healthier food, fibre and fuel. It closes the loop, completes the circle. As a Soil Food Web microbiologist, Glyn Mitchell knows that while it certainly all makes sense, it is a lot more complicated than it sounds. He is someone who knows about cultivating microbes, fungi and bacteria in the right proportions in order to come out with a ‘biologically complete’ compost. At Warwick Farm, he works with Jersey Hemp and their fully owned subsidiary The Carbon Farm. At the time of visiting him, road sweepings from St Lawrence had just arrived in a large parish vehicle. ‘We compost plant material, fix it and put it back in the ground. I farm carbon,’ Glyn explained. ‘Those road sweepings would otherwise be taken to the incinerator, which would release CO2 into the atmosphere, which is bonkers.
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‘The trick to composting is that you’ve got to find all the ingredients that microbes like to eat, particularly bacteria and fungi. All I do is mix them together in the right amounts to make a nice-smelling compost ready to go out on the fields.’ Ideally Glyn wants to see such a localised composting operation for food and green waste in every parish. The Carbon Farm are soon to take delivery of an aerobic digester that would accept food waste from restaurants and cafes, and 24 hours later it comes out as a pasteurised compost ingredient. Visitors to the 2019 Boat Show will have seen this demonstrated in the eco zone of the event. Now Glyn wants to upscale the model. ‘The idea is that people can offset their emissions by choosing a restaurant who send their food waste to us and composting that waste to feed Jersey soil. Soil carbon levels have been depreciating dramatically because of how much we have taken from the soil to grow crops and don’t give back. They used to be up to 15-20%, they are currently around 3%.’
Walking around the tunnels at Jersey Hemp, Glyn points out that nothing could be grown here for 15 years because of the poor soil. But now it is yielding healthy hemp crops. It is estimated that in Jersey 14,000 tonnes of food waste goes to the incinerator every year. Glyn thinks the real figure could be a lot higher. ‘When we were collecting from Nude Food, the first restaurant that sent its food waste for composting, I was collecting 100 kilos a week, and that was just one small outlet. I hope to engage with everyone, including supermarkets, as it doesn’t make sense to burn inedible food waste, when it’s a natural fertiliser.’ He also wants to engage with anyone interested in the land. ‘Our main focus is to make Jersey as resilient to climate change as possible and the best way of doing that is to improve the soil,’ he said. ‘Retain the topsoil and you have improved food security, water security, bio security. It’s a much bigger picture that we have got to get our heads around. We can’t keep depleting our soil.
