Matt Dickinson

What the judges said

We really liked that this project looked at how biochar can be used by farmers on their own farms, at scale.

Matt is part of Climate Spheres UK (CSUK), a UK based start-up with the aim of helping farmers to become more sustainable and resilient to the impacts of climate change.

The business has been working with one 53ha (130 acre) sheep farm in South West Wales in particular, as well as other farmers to develop a process to use crop waste to produce biochar which can be applied back to fields. This provides a climate-friendly soil enhancer that can reduce CO2 emissions directly by sequestering carbon, and indirectly by reducing the need for standard fossil fuel fertilisers.

Biochar also offers a number of other benefits including increasing soil carbon and crop yields, improving water retention (increasing resilience to both flooding and droughts), and absorbing soil pollutants, he says.

We are developing the processes to use carbon credits from applying biochar to subsidise the biochar production and application.

This also offers a diversification opportunity for farmers by providing additional sources of income in the form of carbon credits and moves farmers to a circular economy by reducing waste and improving farm efficiency.

With this funding the group aims to work with the partner farm to develop the on-farm processes farmers could follow to gather crop waste, produce and apply biochar to fields and generate carbon credits by working through the following stages:
Analyse how much biochar can be produced;
Baseline analysis of the farm and soil health;
Experimentation of best process to apply the biochar;
Monitoring the impact of biochar;
Collate results and produce an information package to inform other farmers.

Below is Climate Sphere UK's recent vlog, you can follow their progress and that of the other winners in the SSFF hub here