Dear Reader,

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Greetings once again as we step into another transformative month at Ryzo! I am thrilled to witness the seeds of change we planted with our rebranding from Carbon Count to Ryzo. Our philosophy, rooted in the notion that sustainable farming flourishes in the embrace of healthy soil, has taken a new form – a form that resonates more profoundly with the team and our mission to regenerate degraded farmland through the prism of soil carbon.

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Armed with an intimate understanding of the integration of soil carbon and soil health into sustainable agricultural production, we want farmers to once more cultivate bountiful harvests, build resilience against disease, and fortify their defences against the forces of nature.

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This month, the team is getting ready for the 10th Australasian Emissions Reduction (AER), Summit, hosted by the Carbon Market Institute (CMI) in Sydney September 14-15, where we'll be delving deep into the science of how building carbon in soil with productive agricultural swathe can vastly contribute to emissions reduction and mitigating climate change. Come visit us at stand 14 to see the Ryzo Platform in action and chat to the team. Feel free to set up a meeting with us here.

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Furthermore, our engine room is working diligently on our new platform addition – a powerful tool that will assist farmers in assessing and tracking landscape health and soil carbon. I look forward to introducing it to you in more detail very soon. As part of our commitment to confronting the urgent challenges of our time, I would like to share impressions from my visit earlier this year to drought-impacted Kansas, and from some of our team members who are currently in the United States witnessing the fires sweeping through Northern California and Oregon. These fires, fuelled by carbon-mined deteriorating agricultural lands, serve as stark reminders of the consequences of neglecting our land and soil health.

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Travelling through these drought and now fire-affected regions in the US, we witnessed vast stretches of lifeless, already rock-like agricultural land, and farmers eagerly ploughing through these desolate soils, raising clouds of dust behind their tractors. These visuals paint a poignant picture of the challenges we face.

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The droughts and fires we're witnessing are not isolated incidents; they are symptomatic of a global crisis. Dry, carbon-depleted agricultural landscapes (vegetation and soil) with a vanishing small water cycles, are, by increasing hot land generating hot dry winds that can ignite bushfires cross and downwind from the agricultural districts, form a cycle that increasingly threatens not just ecosystems, but livelihoods.

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The urgency of sequestering carbon back into the land (both in soil and vegetation) and revitalising agricultural landscapes goes far beyond bolstering farm productivity; It is a collective imperative to avert an impending ecological collapse. With each step we take, with every innovation we introduce, we work towards restoring the vitality of our soils, cultivating landscape resilience, and nurturing a world where fires like these are not anthropogenic in causation.

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This is principally a regional terrestrial-derived anthropogenic source of increased heat, and less so a worldwide heating issue related to greenhouse gases. But the solution to both is increasing soil carbon with no bare agricultural land. Let us unite in this critical endeavour, for a world that thrives on the strength of interconnected ecosystems, flourishing farms, and a sustainable future.

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Til’ next month!

Phil