Climate Action Thailand Project #39391

Stop the Smoke - Reduce Global Warming

by Warm Heart Worldwide, Inc

Project Report | May 20, 2021
Friendly Trees Protect the Earth and Feed Farmers

By Evelind Schecter | Program Manager

Moving the biochar to the farmers

When we started working in the Mae Chaem District, our focus was to stop the burning of the huge piles of corn waste so that we could stop the smoke forcing us to breathe through masks many miles away.

In addition to the PM2.5 pollution, the large-scale cultivation of corn has also created a number of devastating local environmental problems.

Huge areas of forests have been cleared to make room for growing corn.
Biodiversity has suffered as animal and bird habitats are destroyed.
Soils have become depleted. They absorb less and less rainwater as forest trees that once allowed water to penetrate the soil are removed. Corn is planted thinly and – unlike the trees it replaces – provides no protection for the soil, which becomes brick-hard when wetted and sun-dried.
This has destroyed watersheds, as the rainwater that once soaked into the ground now runs off rapidly, eroding fields and causing flooding downstream in the Center and South of Thailand.

We've talked with the farmers in the villages where we have been working and they are looking for alternative crops to grow. But the risks of starting new crops are high and farmers have failed in the recent past with programs suggested by outside parties. Farmers commonly have a "show me" mentality, to reduce risk.

Based on our past approach - working closely with the village council, we have an initial set of farmers, who have clear title to their mountain fields. After a review of several alternative crops, the farmers and our staff have decided to test native shade trees with coffee, cocoa, tea, and other trees recommended by experts familiar with the local terrain. The farmers will be able to plant shorter-term crops around the edges of the new forests.

Your donations to support this year's Stop the Smoke! Campaign will get these farmers started. This year they will prepare the land - creating swales with biochar embedded in the soil to start collecting water. An initial set of trees is being purchased and will go into the ground to take advantage of the upcoming rainy season.

With gratitude for your enduring support of our work!

Dana, Michael, Evelind, and the Warm Heart Family

De-Forested Terrain

Links:

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Jan 25, 2021
Stop the Smoke Campaign 2021

By Michael Shafer | Project Leader

Warm Heart’s Stop the Smoke campaign focuses on removing the source of the smoke before it becomes a problem.

Our solution has been to provide farmers a way to benefit from their crop waste by turning it into a profitable product, biochar.

The process of turning crop waste into biochar is smoke-free and produces a product that has a multitude of beneficial uses.

The farmers we have worked with in the past will continue this year to convert their crop waste into biochar. They have reaped the benefits of adding biochar to their fields to improve soil conditions and increase crop yields.

Our goal this year is to continue to reach out to more farmers to increase the amount of crop waste that is turned into biochar, helping to eliminate more smoke from being generated through open field burning.

We are also developing a comprehensive project that will have even bigger, long term impacts on cleaning our air by reducing the amount of crop waste generated every year from corn crops.

Warm Heart will be leading a joint effort to restore forest land that has been used primarily for corn production with crops that produce far less waste and provide sustainable economic growth for the farming communities.

Our partners in this project include Shangri-La Hotel of Chiang Mai, Pacific Basin Economic Council, Kad Kokoa, and Monsoon Tea.

We will be putting forth a plan of agroforestry that will include rebuilding our forest lands with the following crops:

o Thai select cocoa

o Thai coffee

o Forest tea

o Pic Thai, green and black peppers

o Rattan

o Hardwoods

o Traditional tree fruits

Biochar will play a big role in preparing the soils. We will be working directly with select farmers to establish models to demonstrate how agroforestry can restore biodiversity, improve our water systems, create sustainable economic value, and yes, stop the smoke.

We hope you will join us again this year with your continuing financial support and help us Stop the Smoke!

Michael, Evelind, Dana, and the Stop the Smoke team

Planting trees using biochar

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Sep 26, 2020
Biochar is Improving Food Security - Enriching the Soil, Nurturing Healthy Farm Animals

By Evelind Schecter | Co-Founder Warm Heart Worldwide

Mae Chaem Biochar packed for village distribution

Everyone benefits when biochar is made because it reduces the smoke that fills our air!

The biochar itself has many beneficial uses, including improving our soils for better crop yields. It is also a great way to keep livestock and poultry healthy by adding it to their feed and living area.

In Northern Thailand, the rainy season arrived, and the summer months, when it is too wet to burn and make biochar, were spent using the biochar to improve soils and food security. Our programs made more than 100,000 kg* of biochar (100 tons) this year before the rains started.

With Covid19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, many people left the cities for their farming villages. The biochar team worked with local organizations on distribution to remote villages to be used in planting crops, making fertilizer, and animal feed.

In Mae Chaem, we traded biochar for a fertilizer that the local women’s cooperative is making from crop waste compost and biochar. We teamed up with the coffee growers, Akha Ama Coffee, on distribution and training in mountain villages in Chiang Rai province.

The Shangri-La Hotel, Chiang Mai, our first Corporate Sponsor, is having a huge impact with their donations of biochar to a tree planting reforestation program. (You can read about their success in our Environmental Progress Newsletter.) Their donation to the Chiang Mai Urban Farm is cleaning the water in a local canal and producing vegetables for urban dwellers shut out of jobs.

Since the beginning of June, our partners in Kenya and Malawi have held 28 training sessions, expanding their network by over 1,000 trained farmers. As the word is getting out about the benefits of biochar, and how easy it is to make, people are lining up to learn how to do it. Free training covers building a TLUD (from recycled oil barrel) and the simplified trench method, as well as how to use the biochar for fertilizer and in animal feed.

The beauty of the biochar program is that it is simple and can be adopted anywhere there is agricultural burning.

Your investment in this program makes the world a better place. We appreciate your enduring support; this is not an overnight solution but will take time to spread until making biochar instead of open field burning becomes standard practice, around the world. Thank you!

*Each ton of biochar keeps 5 tons of corn waste from being turned into particles of smoke – at 6.26 kg of PM2.5 particles per ton of waste, that’s 31.3 kg of smoke that is not going into the air each day. Each of those kilograms of smoke is the equivalent of 71,429 cigarettes. In addition, greenhouse gases have been burned off before they go into the atmosphere.

Kenya biochar training with trench & roofing sheet

Mae Chaem Crops planted with biochar fertilizer

Kenya farm produce with biochar fertilizer

Links:

Shangri-la donation of biochar to recover forest

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