COULD FUNGI BE THE BEST FORM OF CARBON CAPTURE.?

Soil is a huge carbon sink, but intensive agriculture has degraded its ability to store emissions. The startup Loam Bio wants to use fungi to boost soil health and help keep carbon in the ground. The fungi could help fight the climate crisis, but scientists have questioned its scalability. There is too much carbon in the atmosphere and not enough beneath our feet. Soil forms the basis of food security, holding water and playing host to vast amounts of biodiversity. It also stores an enormous amount of carbon dioxide — a crucial element of healthy land that helps hold the nutrients and water needed for plant growth. But soil carbon is in a sorry state, in part due to current agricultural practices. Soil degradation poses a major risk to food-supply lines, threatening to undermine crop and plant quality. Loam Bio, a biotech startup, has set out to slow down the rapid advance of climate change while dramatically improving soil health at the same time. The Australian company, founded in 2019, has created a microbial fungi-seed coating to enhance agricultural crops’ ability to store carbon in soil. “It kind of blows my mind that there’s so much we don’t know about this incredible group of organisms,” Guy Hudson, the CEO and a cofounder of Loam Bio, told Insider. Hudson’s startup has wowed investors, raising A$155 million, or around $100 million, to date to scale its product from investors including the US heavyweight investor Chris Sacca’s climate-tech fund Lowercarbon Capital. The lure for Lowercarbon Capital was the lack of additional land, energy, equipment, or dramatic behavior changes needed for microbial-carbon removal to thrive. Loam Bio is part of a bevy of young companies trying to enhance natural processes as a form of carbon removal. Scientists have predicted that, if we are to achieve our goals for climate and economic growth, 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide must be drawn down from the atmosphere annually. Sustainable agriculture and carbon sequestration, including from soil-carbon management, could reduce up to or the equivalent of 4.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually. We posted also on this site a further interesting article about Fungi, search Fungi for more info.