Assistant Professor of Industrial Design Braden Trauth (in DAAP’s School of Design) is expanding strategies to drawdown carbon pollution in our atmosphere through materials that make up the products we purchase. His research aims to grow those materials in a way that sequesters carbon in them, and the soil they’re grown in, while reducing industrial inputs, which all have a carbon footprint, through mimicking natural ecosystems.
This research is founded in one area within Dr. Trauth’s sustainability expertise that has popularly been called Regenerative Agriculture, an area that he has developed and worked to bring to the mainstream over the last 15 years. He laid out a plan for a quarter acre research plot that was refined by students in Biology Professor Ken Petren’s Urban Ecosystem Research Class. Petren is the Director of the UC Center for Field Studies, where the plot is located. There are two rows of Oak trees for timber. One row was planted as a traditional row crop with only oaks spaced for timber development. In the second row, several species were co-planted with the Burr and Red Oaks to mimic a successional ecosystem, going from pasture to forest, to compare the results of these two Alley crop models. This research was launched with a pilot grant from the UC Center for Public Engagement. It was also supported by the UC Center for Field Studies.
The many forms of Regenerative Agriculture have been identified by Drawdown.org to be some of our most attainable Carbon Sinks through simple tweaks to our farming methods. In some regions and farming methods these tweaks, such as Alley Cropping, have been implemented for decades, while others may take more research and effort to encourage farmers to adopt them. Regenerative Agriculture has many forms, but most people agree that its core component is founded in Organic Agriculture, but with a focus on rebuilding soil to store carbon. This means the elimination of chemicals and tilling because they both kill off the soil microbiology and specifically the fungal hyphae which are a core component of the soil food web in most ecosystems, deserts being the anomaly, which are bacterially dominant and subsequently don’t store much carbon in the soil.
This project has many species, some fast growing, to mimic a field turning into a forest, while others are slower growing, such as the oaks, which are a climax species in our regional forests. All the species selected play an important role in the ecological and thus farming process in this study. The goal will be to quantify all the yields, not just the materials harvested but also the ecological outcomes such as cleaner water, cooler soil and air temperatures, increased biological diversity, carbon sequestration and more fertile soils to increase yields. The hope is that farmers can earn an equivalent income or higher than the simple alley crop of oaks. The other goal is that the farmers could earn more money for the carbon sequestered on site from global carbon markets while reaping those other yields. This project will have a 20 year horizon and thus its research outcomes will trickle in over those years.
Stay tuned for the results in the years to come.