Loam Bio, a biotech company founded in Australia in 2020, has developed a biotechnology to address climate change through carbon farming. Carbon farming is an agricultural practice that aims to enhance plants’ natural capacity to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere in the form of stable organic matter in the soil, thereby mitigating climate change and promoting soil health. Loam Bio’s fungal inoculation biotechnology can help farmers achieve carbon farming.
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Challenges: carbon emissions and carbon farming
Carbon emissions
Since the early 1900s, carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere have increased by 50% due to human activities. When fossil fuels (such as coal, oil, and natural gas) are burned for energy production, transportation, and industrial processes, CO₂ is released into the atmosphere. This excess CO₂ acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat and causing the air and ocean temperatures to rise. CO₂ emissions play a crucial role in driving climate change.
This warming effect has caused the global average temperature to rise by about 1.1 ºC since the pre-industrial period. This has led to rising in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, melting of polar ice caps and glaciers and rising sea levels, shifts in species ranges and increased risk of species extinction, agriculture and food security, and ocean acidification.
To mitigate these impacts, the Paris Agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2 ºC above pre-industrial levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that a “carbon budget” of about 500 GtCO₂, which corresponds to about ten years at current emission rates, provides a 66% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 ºC.
Carbon farming
Through photosynthesis, plants extract CO₂ from the atmosphere as part of the carbon life cycle. This carbon is converted into sugars that nourish plants and soil microorganisms. Plant and microbial decomposition results in the accumulation of soil organic carbon (SOC). SOC contributes significantly to soil health, agriculture, climate change mitigation, and food solutions.
However, intensive cultivation practices have reduced oil organic carbon levels, making land unsuitable for profitable crop production and CO₂ emissions.
Carbon farming refers to agricultural practices that aim to increase SOC, enhance soil health, and promote sustainable agriculture. Carbon farming plays a significant role in addressing climate change by sequestering CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil and plants. This process helps to offset greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), soil carbon sequestration has the potential to remove between 2 and 5 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent per year, making it a crucial component of global climate change mitigation efforts.
Loam Bio Technology
Loam Bio (Loam) has developed a biotechnology that inoculates the soil and/or a plant growing in the soil with an effective amount of Clonostachys fungi. The inoculation of fungi is accomplished through seed-coating or other suitable means. The fungal species are non-pathogenic to crop plants and are resistant to conventional fungicides. As fungi and plants grow together, they sequester and fix carbon from atmospheric CO₂ and convert this carbon to stable complex polysaccharides, resulting in the long-term storage of sequestered atmospheric carbon in the soil in a stable form and an increase in SOC.