You breathed easier last haze season, didn’t you? Pat yourselves on the back. You helped to reduce the amount of smoke in the air by raising 1,000,000 baht to support the Warm Heart Stop the Smoke! Campaign. And how about a round of applause for Citylife? CityLife’s Garden Fair contributed a full 15% of that – 150,000 baht. You donated that, too!
How did you Stop the Smoke!?
With your donations, Warm Heart went to Mae Chaem District, 60 km west of Chiang Mai, which burns 95,000 tons of corn crop waste every year, to teach farmers how to turn their corncob into biochar. Making biochar emits no smoke and no smog-precursors. Put in the ground, one ton of biochar permanently sequesters three tons of CO2. And in the ground, biochar restores degraded soils, retains water and improves farmers’ crop yields.
Scattered piles like the one on the left contain more than 8,000 tons of cob; normally, they burn, feeding smoke to Chiang Mai’s haze cover.
Warm Heart trained entire families to make biochar machines, biochar and biochar fertilisers and used your donations to buy the biochar they made. Warm Heart literally bought solid smoke – a lot of it – and put hundreds of people to work. Your 1,000,000 baht supported fifty families during the dry season when no jobs are available and helped Warm Heart make 150 tons of biochar, removing 4.5 tons – tons – of smoke from your air.
From left to right: Machine-making training for families, A whole family at work, Biochar drying in the sun
What happened to all of that biochar? It became SuperDirt!, a bestselling organic fertiliser! Buy some now before it is all gone!
What now?
Your donations lit the match; this year Warm Heart plans to make a small fire. With your help, we proved that our local farmer-based approach works. This year, we want to see if we can grow our project to a size big enough to interest the Government.
How big is that?
2017 = 150 tons of biochar, 1,000,000 baht in new community income and 4.5 tons of haze.
2018 = 1.750 tons of biochar, 3,750,000 baht in new community income and 52.5 tons of haze.
From Warm Heart, all we can say is Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Michael Shafer
Director, Warm Heart Foundation
Director, Stop the Smoke! Campaign 2017
Warm Heart Foundation
A.Phrao, Chiang Mai