Welcome back to Eric Toensmeier author of The Carbon Farming Solution

Photo Source: carbonfarmingsolution.com

Eric Toensmeier is back on permies with a heavyweight mind-blowing book!

This week he will be joining us to talk about all sorts of different topics related to his last book.

There are four copies of his book, The carbon farming solution up for grabs.

You can read the first review of the book posted on permies.com written by Burra Maluca, our Mother Tree, it's her first 10 out of 10 acorns!!

Eric will be stopping by on the forum over the next few days answering questions and joining in discussions.

From now through this Friday, any posts in this forum, ie the carbon farming forum, could be selected to win.

To win, you must use a name that follows our naming policy and you must have your email set up in Paul's Daily-ish email.

The winner will be notified by email and must respond within 24 hours.

Posts in this thread won't count, but please feel free to say hi to Eric and make him feel welcome!

Welcome back Eric!

I want to thank you for writing this book - I think it's probably the most important one I've ever read.

I put up my review yesterday, if anyone wants to check it out - review of The Carbon Farming Solution

Hi Eric, I've been looking recently at humanure recycling to agriculture in the Irish context, and your book popped up in the searches that I was following at the time. I'm off now to read the reviews! Welcome to the forum.

Welcome and thanks for visiting us.

Burra's been talking about how great your book is and even wrote us a review. I'm very excited to read your book.

Hi Eric,
I loved "Perennial Vegetables" and I'm looking forward to this book.
Thanks,
JOhn S
PDX OR

Hi Eric. I have Edible Forest Gardens. I'm wondering if you can briefly outline the material this book covers that isn't covered in those two volumes? Thank you, Todd

Hi everyone this is Eric.

Thanks for spending the week with me. And thanks very much for the 10 out of 10 acorns review! I worked long and hard on this book, thanks to the support of my kickstarter backers who no doubt include many of you. In fact if you look closely, you'll notice that permies.com is mentioned in the dedication, because so many people from this community help to support me in writing.

A few words about my overall goal of the book. It is not particularly written for gardeners, though it has much to offer to gardeners. The primary audiences are farmers and farmer groups, policymakers, funders, and researchers. One of the goals that became apparent during the writing process was to pull together scientific evidence supporting regenerative agricultural practices, to help us to gain access to the hundreds of billions (yes that's billions with a "b") of dollars already being spent on climate change mitigation. Agriculture and land use are responsible for a quarter of all emissions but we receive about 2% of mitigation funding. One of the limitations to our getting access to that money, and to the scaling up of our practices that would enable, is a lack of awareness and understanding of the scientific evidence. Thus I've worked hard to present this in the book. Some great practices that I personally am a fan of, like keyline and holistic grazing, receive much less airtime in the book than I would like because scientific evidence is either largely absent (keyline) or a source of much controversy (holistic grazing). For the record, once again, I think both of these practices are great, but in the absence of robust scientific evidence in their favor I chose not to emphasize them strongly because my goal is to achieve legitimacy for the practices we know and love (and many that might be new to many of you, as some were to me), so that we can get ourselves in the center of the climate solutions platform and the funding that comes with it, and the increased funding that will be coming with it down the pike.

I'll also invite you to visit carbonfarmingsolution.com, where I've posted a lot of free material from the book as well as a number of really fantastic videos describing the range of practices covered in the book. I'm well aware that the book is a pricey one, though at one cent per page the price seems fairly reasonable to me, especially including all the beautiful color photographs that help bring the ideas to life. This is why I'm posting lots of information on my website and will continue to do so, to make it possible for people to get as much of the information as possible without owning a copy. As some have already mentioned in the comments, it's a great book to get your library to order.

As for the big vision of the book: it provides a toolkit of practices, species, and policies to enable the rapid expansion of carbon–friendly agriculture. In particular I am looking at practices that sequester carbon in soil and in above–ground biomass. While it is not the case that this can return us to "stone age levels of carbon", wide implementation of these practices could really save our bacon if implemented alongside drastic reductions in emissions and a substantial transformation of every aspect of civilization – a transformation that, let's face it, was really overdue for a long time regardless. In all I cover about 40 different practices, many of which are familiar in the permaculture lexicon already. One of the most striking things for me was learning the very large scale at which some of these things are already practiced, and that some of them have been practiced for thousands of years. It turns out that our permaculture movement, while very significant, is only one of many players in the carbon farming game, some have of whom have been at it for 10,000 years or more. Always nice to be humbled eh!

I look forward to your questions and thoughts.

Eric

Hi everyone,

Until and unless I learned how to respond. I post, I'll just handle your thoughts and questions here.

Burra Maluca - Well gosh thank you! That's about as good a review as a writer ever hope for.

Feidhlim Hardy - I don't talk much about human manure in particular in the book though I agree it is a critical strategy. I do however talk quite a bit about the use of compost (from whatever raw materials) and its impact in improving carbon sequestration in cropland and grasslands.

To everyone excited to read the book: I'm excited for you to read it too. My editor encouraged me to "let the geek flow through me", so it is dense but there's some pretty cool stuff in there. Hope you enjoy it.

Todd Parr: Edible forest gardens are a subset of the category of multistrata agroforestry. Multistrata agroforestry itself is only one of about 40 strategies that I address in the book. So there really isn't a whole lot of overlap with any of my previous books. I'm looking much more at farm scale, looking globally, and looking at many more practices including those that incorporate livestock and annual crops. I also include six chapters on perennial staple crops to provide protein, carbohydrates, and fats, as well as six chapters on perennial industrial crops for materials, chemicals, and energy.

This is definitely getting added to my book shopping list.

Seems like most farm level agriculture scales down to the suburban lot better than suburban agriculture scales up. Even aimed at the larger scale farmers I still expect this book to be full of useful information for my yard. Thank you for taking the time and reviewing the research for this.

I'll also invite you to visit carbonfarmingsolution.com, where I've posted a lot of free material from the book as well as a number of really fantastic videos describing the range of practices covered in the book.

Sounds like a good place for me to start before I make any further comments. Thanks for all you are doing Eric.

I'm so glad to hear this book exists! We truly need to turn our efforts into the soil, it's where our salvation lies.

Thanks for the work that you've done, Eric!

Welcome Eric!

I can't wait to read your book. I love that "your geek" flowed through you and into the book!

I can understand that what you're trying to do is to mainstream a set of practical solutions; and that humanure is another whole possible area of resistance for people. I'll be interested to read your composting sections anyway.

Welcome back as well, I have peeped a lot into your perenial lists for my sub-tropical climate.
Very thorough work you do, very complete.

Hi Eric, and welcome. This new book looks.... revolutionary! I have to say that I really treasure the 'Paradise Lot' story you told :) ... especially that you shared the plants that didn't play nice in a small city lot ... saved many folks hours of work ;)

Thank you, Eric. For me these recent threads about carbon farming have been some of the most exciting discussions we've ever had on permies!

I'd like to really thank all of my fellow permies and Eric for the great days together, it has been awesome to read all the discussions thet have come up in this forum.
It is nice when we have the opportunity to get more than a simple book promotion, when the knowledge of a passionate author like Eric triggers many of us to focus on a specific topic and discuss it.

Well thanks everyone it's been really fun. I was telling Lorenzo the other day that I have been very impressed by the high caliber of everyone's questions and comments. I hope those of you that want a book enjoy it, and that the rest of you get a chance to read it whether you buy your own, borrow from a friend, or get it from the library. Climate change gives us a motivation to take what we've been learning and spread it and scale it up. And the science I've investigated in the book also challenges us on a few of our dearly–held beliefs, though mostly it reinforces what we've been saying all along.

I've been in terrible health and won't be on the road teaching much at all. I do plan to do some long form a webinar classes this year to offer people a chance to get some of what they might get in a five day course, from the comfort of their own home. By doing so we get a far better carbon footprint anyway And don't forget to check out all the free resources at carbonfarmingsolution.com.

Thanks again to everyone at permies for organizing this event and for your support and sponsorship of the three years it took me to write it.

Welcome Eric,
I will definately get the book.

Hi Eric,
I've been reading your excerpt on your website and it's , wow, inspiring! The photos are great as well as the stories about what farmers are doing to change the course of agriculture.

I am totally impressed at the quality of your work and your deep commitment to bringing this information to light. And the book has been published with excellent timing in relation to the recent carbon climate talks and the growing realization that we must do something NOW.

From what I have read so far, many of the examples are taking place in more humid, tropical climates. Do you also include examples of carbon farming in a more arid "brittle" climate? We are in Northern NM, with an annual precipitation of 20 inches or so, high winds and high elevation and it is proving difficult to get perennials established for many reasons. We are doing pretty well with our annual/no-till production of food and with our free ranging/pastured dairy goats but it's the perennials that are challenging me here. I would love to see some examples of perennial carbon sequestration in arid climates.

I hope your book goes viral, Eric! Thanks for your passion and your major contribution to healing the planet!

Sequoia

So I ran the winner picker app in the forum software and we have 2 winners.
(Took me some time just to be sure I had done everything right)

R Ranson
and
Neil Layton

Congratulations R and Neil!

I sent you an email to ask for the email address of the person that first referred you to Permies.com. That person (if qualified) will also get a copy of the book and a permies care package.

How Wonderful!

It couldn't have come at a better time. I was only this morning lamenting how long it would take to save up the money to buy that book. After all the amazing discussions, and Burra's inspiring review, I really want my own copy. Before this event, I had no idea that carbon farming would be relevant to the little patch of earth I tend.

Thank you very much, and thank you Eric for visiting us.

Bounce! Bounce!

I'm really pleased to hear this. I want to integrate Eric's work into my own plans and, ultimately, help teach others to do so. I'm looking forward to reading this, and promise a review.