Using agricultural feedstocks to address environmental challenges with market-driven solutions

When posed with the growing environmental challenges of climate change, increased competition for resources (land, water, energy), and mounting decisions farmers must make on a daily basis to remain profitable and to continue to feed a growing population, one might think that circularity is an oversimplification to these competing issues.  However, utilizing our resources and systems effectively calls for more careful thought and investment across the public and private sectors. To strategize these efforts, several questions must be answered: How might we best utilize agricultural feedstocks not currently being utilized to reduce waste and emissions? How might we provide additional economic opportunities to farmers, already pressed for time and overwhelmed with the surplus of tools and opt-in markets to choose from? But more importantly, how might we best work together to solve these challenges that neither the agricultural industry nor the public sector can solve independently? Food and agriculture's interconnectedness to many existing systems in urban and rural environments requires that we work outside of our siloes and across sectors to solve these big challenges, collaboratively and with the protection of ur food supply and planet in mind. These questions will be discussed with various proposed hypotheses to these challenges by proposing the incorporation of biochar as a negative emissions technology, which can be a key component of a circular economy.

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) is poised to facilitate the necessary research on cross-cutting and multi-industry topics to respond to such issues by building public-private partnerships to support audacious science addressing today's food and agriculture challenges.  

Keywords: biochar agriculture circular economy

Lauren Hershey
The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR)