Agroforestry and seawater desalination
Innovative model : The Franco-Moroccan startup Sand to Green recently raised a million dollars to set up its model of plantations in an arid environment in Morocco. The young company is thinking big since it aims to green the deserts through agroforestry and seawater desalination. Benjamin Rombaut, CEO of Sand to Green, tells us more.
ALM : What exactly is your project? And what services do you offer to companies that join?
Benjamin Rombaut : Our project is an agricultural project for the rehabilitation of arid lands and more generally degraded lands through agroforestry and seawater desalination. More specifically, we combine agroforestry strategies developed specifically for these desert environments, that we associate with water desalination units to deploy large-scale tree and crop plantations that will produce fruits, various plants and capture carbon. We therefore have different types of income: agricultural (fruits and plants, in particular aromatic herbs and fodder) and the issuance and sale of impact certificates on the voluntary carbon offset market.
So we propose our projects to investors in agriculture and we then take care of developing them for them. This therefore allows them to finance an agriculture that regenerates the soil and is ecological because it does not create deforestation, with a strong social impact, but which ensures yields similar to, or even higher than, conventional agriculture. In addition, we also offer companies that want to offset their carbon emissions our high added value certificates because in addition to certifying carbon capture, they also attest to many other positive impacts: fight once morest food insecurity, restoration of biodiversity , environmental protection, good water management, etc.
Why did you think of planting trees and desalinating seawater as solutions to adopt?
A tree, by taking root and growing, will recreate a small water cycle through the shade it creates, its roots, its evapotranspiration and its photosynthesis. Thus, as soon as we replant a tree, we allow a whole ecosystem to be built around it.
Today, deserts represent regarding 1/3 of the land surface on earth and are advancing every year: it is estimated that this advance represents 12 million hectares, that is to say regarding 23 hectares which disappear every minute. To fight once morest this, desalination provides a boost, an initial aid to trees to establish themselves in a fairly hostile environment with very little water. As they grow stronger, they become increasingly self-sufficient through their ability to manage their own water cycle.
Finally, we quickly realized and our work has shown it, that by simply and cleverly helping nature to establish itself in a desert territory, the benefits were numerous and immediate. Thus, we believe that a serious fight once morest climate change and for the protection of the environment must use this human intelligence in the service of a large-scale restoration of desert lands. Like these great challenges which lead to others, we have finally chosen species which can be useful to man and in particular to his diet because at the same time the increase in the world population and in particular in Africa will increase further and also requires large-scale agricultural responses.
Could you give us an idea of the various agronomic tests carried out for 3 years in the south of Morocco, in the region of Guelmin-Oued Noun?
Wissal Ben Moussa, our Chief Agricultural Officer, spent three years testing different cropping strategies to better understand which of them were best suited to the extreme conditions of desert conditions. Some of these tests proved to be extremely successful and led to many results: production of one ton of vegetables per week, selection of the best seeds adapted to aridity, wind management and water optimization, installation community processing units…
Finally, these three years of testing led to defining the best combination of plants in an arid environment, which we now want to develop on a large scale on plantations of several hundred hectares.
What social and environmental impact would you like to generate through these ecological projects?
With these large plantations our objectives are multiple. Socially, we want to create jobs in areas strongly affected by the rural exodus. We also want to offer products with high added value to local markets and which are adapted to the diets of the communities. Finally, we also want to share our agricultural know-how to enable everyone to “cultivate their own garden” and thus work towards autonomy and food security in arid areas.
Ecologically, we want through agroforestry to refertilize degraded soils and allow, little by little, their restoration. Also, our plantations also aim to reestablish biodiversity, to fix nitrogen in the soil, to capture carbon and therefore, ultimately, to allow agriculture with a positive impact, which is good for the environment and humanity. .
What types of trees do you offer for planting in desert areas? And why species of trees rather than others?
We have studied and then chosen regarding ten specific species capable of fitting into our agroforestry plantations. This choice was made according to 4 main criteria: we wanted trees endemic to arid regions and adapted to their soils, which capture carbon, which are useful to humans (economically viable) and which finally make it possible to refertilize the soil.
In our first plantations, we are planting fig, carob and pomegranate trees, in addition to numerous intercrops. We were strongly inspired by the ancestral cultures practiced in the oases which have been practicing this type of agroforestry for several millennia. Evidenced by this quote from Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 AD), Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher on agroforestry in the 1st century in Tunisia: “In the shade of a proud palm tree grows an olive tree, and under the olive tree, the fig tree and the pomegranate tree, and under this one the grape. Under the grapes, the wheat, then the legumes. Finally, leafy greens. All this in the same year, and each being nourished in the shade of the other.
The desalination of seawater requires a lot of investment resources. How do you plan to operate seawater desalination on a small scale?
The growing need for fresh water in our societies, combined with the disruption of the water cycle, generates strong disparities between the need for fresh water and its availability, thus pushing us to find new solutions to meet it. The desalination of seawater has therefore made great progress in recent years, thus reducing its price per cubic meter, and future developments are promising, in particular thanks to graphene membranes.
The use of this technology on a small scale, and modular, represents several advantages for Sand to Green. First of all, we have better control of costs and of our production, compared to large desalination plants. Then, this lower production allows us to recycle our brine (hyper-salty solution resulting from the desalination process). Finally, the investments necessary for the installation of these units are partly offset by carbon credits and thus justify the criterion of additionality, i.e. the project might not have been implemented without the financing the sale of carbon credits.
