Lucas Ihlein & Allan Yeomans: Soil & the Carbon Economy
During 2018-19 Lucas Ihlein worked with physicist, engineer, farmer and inventor Allen Yeomans. The son of PA Yeomans, Allan is part of an esteemed family of agricultural innovators in Australia. His latest innovation is the Yeomans Carbon Still – a device for measuring soil carbon sequestration. In the near future, when a carbon economy is in place, farmers will be paid for storing carbon dioxide in their soils via regenerative agriculture. The Yeomans Carbon Still is ready to go – but it is yet to be approved by the Australian government as a licenced method of measuring the amount of carbon sequestered in agricultural soils.
In early 2019, as part of their collaborative project called Baking Earth, Ihlein and Yeomans demonstrated the Yeomans Carbon Still in a major exhibition entitled Shapes of Knowledge, curated by Hannah Mathews at the Monash University Museum of Art.
The device was used for public demonstrations with local farmers to test its effectiveness as a tool for encouraging widespread transformation of farming practices.
The Baking Earth project explored methods for bringing together policy makers and farmers, to encourage Australia’s carbon reductions program to be more inclusive of rural knowledge.
Artists’ Blog
It’s 56 pages long, raw and wriggling, and it has a free pull-out poster. We have finally published the newspaper that tells the story of ‘An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar’, and we’d love to share it with you.