Sown

The smallholder landholders of the developing world are, and will be, the hardest hit by the effects of climate change. They generally do not have the resources, economic or otherwise, to bear the brunt of an erratic climate. Additionally, due to weak governance structures, the natural environment is being exploited at a rate of knots causing widespread erosion and environmental degradation on the small and large scale.

Many organisations have committed to be carbon neutral by 2030 (or something similar) through purchasing offsets. From this, Sown was born, to link smallholder landholders to the currently available climate finance.

If scaled globally, the Sown system would help to sequester carbon, thereby reducing the severity of climate change. And it would pay some of the world's poorest to do it, helping to alleviate poverty. All while benefitting the local environment and ecosystems.

Poverty and climate change are arguably the defining issues of our time. Their drivers, problems and solutions are great and varied, large and small.  

Climate change is principally due to an increased amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent the emission of refrigerants. Climate change can, in part, be mitigated by sequestering carbon through biological growth, principally through trees and algae.

Poverty is the lack of an income great enough to account for a minimum standard of living. Poverty has a variety of social, political, biophysical, historical, economic, and cultural drivers. This can be compounded in rural settings where there is less opportunity to work and a lack of farm services to make agricultural systems profitable.

As climate change is a global issue, it affects everyone. Though it's forecast to hit smallholders the hardest. The FAO states that 1.5 billion people live in a smallholder household. They also state the majority of those in extreme poverty are in this group.

My idea for a solution isn't location specific, though in the development process, an initial location and agro-ecosystem will be identified.

The Sown system proposes to incentivise smallholders to sow their land with native vegetation and pay them for the carbon they sequester through doing so. The Sown system pays them by creating a link between the smallholders (farmers and landholders) and organisations looking to offset their carbon footprint. For example, here in Australia most of the major banks and other large companies have carbon footprint reduction targets.

The payment mechanism for these offsets would be mobile money services such as M-Pesa as they only require a mobile phone and connection (something that is becoming increasingly available in the developing world). 

GIS technology is integral to the Sown system as it is an inexpensive vehicle for providing the necessary provenance to the offsets being purchased. As this is not currently an industry standard, the Sown system is novel in this sense.

The Sown system serves both the smallholders and organisations providing the offsets.

It serves the smallholders by providing a passive income from their land with minimal to no labour input costs. As many smallholders already work off-farm to supplement their income, I believe this system is an attractive alternative to the current low-input, low-output agricultural (typically cereal) production system that dominates the smallholder farming sector due to the shortage in on-farm labour. Sown would allow smallholders to focus more attention on the productive parts of their land and gain a reliable income from the other.

And it serves the organisations by granting them the social capital associated with alleviating both poverty in the developing world and climate change at the same time. I believe this is something that will incentivise organisations to use the Sown system as it is marketable through their corporate responsibility initiatives. 

Sown aligns well with the first aim of the Sustainable Food Systems Challenge as it helps to build a small-scale producers' financial resilience to climate change and allows them to dedicate more of their labour to the productive areas of their farm. 

Sown partially aligns with the second solution as it helps to reduce runoff and erosion, and subsequent water pollution. The exception is that it does this for small-scale farmers. Planting the highest erosion risk areas with native vegetation would both catch water and nutrient runoff but also provide vital structure to the soil and habitat for local ecosystems.

The Sown system solution is innovative for two primary reasons.

The first is that there are no other firms combining development/poverty reduction aims with carbon sequestration goals. A very well publicized carbon crediting scheme was Indigo Ag's "Terraton" initiative where farmers are rewarded for increasing the amount of carbon (organic and inorganic) in their soil.  

The second is the lack of credibility and provenance in the carbon crediting industry. Currently there is no third-party body to monitor the credibility of carbon offset schemes. Similarly there is a chronic lack of transparency in the industry thereby degrading a consumer's trust in it. Sown plans to build our system with transparency (and therefore credibility) inherent to it. Providing that provenance would distinguish it from other carbon offset providers.

The Sown system would either be app or web based as a medium for linking the smallholders with the available offset providers/funding. As this is yet to be developed there is plenty of wiggle room in this aspect of the solution.

The provenance and accountability aspect of the Sown system necessitates the use of GIS/Geospatial technology. This technology provides an inexpensive way of proving to the offset providers and the public that our claims to carbon sequestration are genuine and verifiable.

The platform for linking one party with the funding and the other with the service is perhaps the most widely used and accepted technology that I can think of (AirBnB and Uber come to mind). So I am confident that the Sown system will use this technology as effectively as it's other users.

The GIS/Geospatial technology is also very commonly used in a variety of industries. This is especially so in agriculture. For example, GIS is currently used to link yield maps taken during harvesting with variable-rate input application technology (such as fertiliser) to increase input-use efficiency. Over 90% of large-scale farm machinery in Australia has some level of geospatial technology built in to reduce soil compaction and input use efficiency.

The long-term outcomes of the Sown system are: money in the pocket's of smallholders, and carbon sequestered out of the air. To achieve this, the first activities will be to develop and test the automated provenance system, conduct testing with farmers and engage the carbon offset providers. From these, the expected outputs would be successful testing of the Sown systems and ironing out of bugs, and farmers and carbon offset providers see the value in engaging with the Sown system.

As the system is still being developed, it doesn't serve anyone at the moment. And as I am unaware of a system like this, I would merely be speculating the number of people it could serve in a year. Yet as I plan for the system to be as automated as possible with minimal face-to-face interaction with the farmers

Our goal within the next year is to test that the systems work and refine them to suit different agro-ecological zones and agricultural systems. The more we are able to refine the system to cater for more agricultural systems, the more farmers we can serve and carbon we can pull out of the atmosphere.

Within 5 years, we would like to cover at least 5 different agricultural systems and rewarded farmers at least AUD$1 million (that year) in carbon offset funding. Roughly speaking this would result in 200,000 tonnes of carbon pulled out of the atmosphere; approximately equal to the annual emissions of 43,000 cars.

The financial barrier that currently exists is that Sown remains a side project for both Jarryd and I. As we both work full time, dedicating enough time to work on the solution can be a struggle during busy periods of the year.

The technical barrier is that as the model is yet to be tested for offset delivery. So it isn't exactly known how well the solution will perform and be taken up by farmers and offset providers.

At the moment, I can't think of any legal, cultural or market barriers. I imagine that as the solution progresses, these will arise and actions will be taken to overcome them.

The financial barrier will be overcome as we look for seed funding and Sown begins to take up more of our time and we can work on it full-time.

The technical barrier will be overcome by getting the solution to a satisfactory stage of development and testing it with farmers and offset providers.

Currently the team is two people working part-time on the solution.

My name is Harry Campbell-Ross, I had the initial idea for the Sown system whilst working as a Research Officer at the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). I am an agricultural scientist working on livestock emissions and climate change in smallholder agricultural systems. I provide the scientific and some of the GIS expertise to the Sown System

Jarryd Boyd is a manager of Innovation, Solutions & Ventures at KPMG Australia. Jarryd was brought into the team at inception and provides considerable expertise in business management and technology.

Currently we have a loose affiliation with the climate change program at ACIAR. They provider mentorship and some intellectual assistance in the mechanics of the carbon offset market and navigation through domestic and international bureaucracy. 

The Sown system benefits the farmers as gives them access to a source of passive income. For example, they could turn their least productive paddock(s) to carbon storage, giving them more time to focus on the rest of their farm. It benefits the offset providers as use of the Sown systems gives them a marketable product, combating both poverty and climate change. They could use their usage of Sown to promote their commitments to corporate responsibility.

We are applying to Solve because we believe that this solution has the power and potential to positively change the livelihoods of smallholder farmers around the world, whilst helping to combat climate change. We are also applying to Solve because we believe that the expertise provided by Solve will help overcome the technical barriers to bring the model to testing, and help us overcome the legal, cultural, and market barriers as they arise with development.

We would like to partner with people who can help us refine our model and the technical side of things. And people who can improve our business management acumen and help us expand the business to help us reach more farmers. From an MIT perspective, we are interested in partnering with people who are familiar with this business model and can help us navigate the initial set up, testing, and expansion of activities. 

We are interested in partnering with companies that are keen to use our system of carbon offset provision and poverty reduction as part of their corporate responsibility strategy. 

We would also like to engage with Indigo Ag's Terraton initiative to discuss how they administered carbon offset provision and engaged with stakeholders.