Possible Futures #003: Carbon Country

Reimagining land use from the ground up with agrivoltaics, carbon capture, and bitcoin mining

Mark Smith was poking around abandoned mines in West Virginia, looking for a place to spin up something on the smaller side of utility-scale solar, when a fellow soccer dad put him on the path to what would become Carbon Country: a multi-hyphenate operation that brings together farming, community solar, carbon sequestration, and bitcoin mining in a new kind of value stack for small-time agricultural land.

“He does utility scale solar now. And so I asked him: ‘How many acres would I need to do five megawatts of solar?’ And he was like, ‘Mark, you need about 25 acres of land.’”

So Mark left the mine search behind in favor of 25+-acre ranches, ultimately settling on one closer to 75 in rural Maryland, part ranch, part forest, all Carbon Country.

“I always had this idea: what if I can build a power company, one solar panel and one ASIC at a time? And so when we got the farm and I saw the barn, I was like, man, this is it.”

Agrivoltaics: An elegant solution for rural land use challenges

One of the chief criticisms of building up solar capacity in rural areas is that it takes would-be farmland out of production, reducing the amount of land in a given community devoted to producing food.

Agrivoltaics—the idea that you can use the same plot of land to simultaneously capture energy and produce food—changes that.

“It’s a very complicated word for a very simple concept,” says Smith. “And the whole magic is that you can sort of have your cake and eat it too.”

In the case of Carbon Country, agrivoltaics means installing solar panels above the same land used for grazing sheep, though it could be fruit trees or row crops or any other kind of grazing herd. The grazing setup in particular is better for the land. Instead of the intermittent mowing required for solar-only setups, rotational grazing lets sheep eat from and fertilize the land in their own way. The sheep benefit, too.

“The shade from the panels actually lowers the water intake of the animals because they're not as hot, and so it preserves water. This is critical out west, et cetera. If you're thinking about California or Colorado, wherever you have very serious water issues,” says Smith. “And then it also lowers the heat stress on the animal. They're healthier, so they're gaining weight faster. So it actually gives you better animals and everybody's happier.”

The whole setup allows farmers to double-dip on their real estate investment, generating clean energy and associated income on top of the revenue generated by food production.

“The reality is that if we're going to be able to power reshoring and AI build out, we're going to need power from all sources. If you think about all of the energy that we're going to need to build, there's not enough condemned land to accomplish that. We're going to have to find innovative ways to include rural areas, and I think agrivoltaics is an incredibly elegant solution to this land use problem,” says Smith.

“And at the same time, you're leaving the land basically better than you got it, which is to me kind of magical and really exciting.”

Digging beneath the surface

From the ground up, the uses for land are clear and fairly easy to grasp: grazing and solar capture. But Carbon Country intends to extend their productive land use and revenue streams into the soil itself, with biochar, and then far beneath the surface with a carbon capture method known as wood vaulting.

“It's kind of reverse coal,” says Smith.

“The idea is that, in the forestry process, the major logs go to lumber. But the branches you can bury. One ton of branches equals one ton of CO2. On one acre, you can bury 10,000 tons of these branches,” effectively sequestering carbon that would otherwise make its way into the atmosphere through decomposition and other natural processes. “People have dug up pieces of wood that were in this same situation, carbon dated it to 3,500 years old, with 93% of its carbon left.”

Biochar, a 90% carbon soil amendment made from wood chips with applications across agriculture, water filtration, concrete and beyond, is similarly effective at keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. It also has the added benefit of producing energy as a byproduct.

“As part of the process [of creating biochar], we’ll produce 5mW of waste heat,” says Smith. “So if we put an organic Rankine system together, which basically turns that heat into steam drive, the turbine generates electricity, and we can generate substantial base load power to combine with our intermittent [solar] power.”

A new kind of energy ecosystem

The energy part of the equation–a combination of base load power from biochar heat waste and intermittent solar power–helps to guarantee not only a whole other revenue stream, but cost savings for the local community.

“If we can build this as a community solar project, we can lower the electrical rates of low income residents by 20% and median income residents by 10%,” says Smith. “That's our objective. And then we're putting in battery storage and bitcoin mining.”

All of these pieces together help ensure that no power goes to waste, the local community can get a discount on clean energy, and Carbon Country can generate maximum revenue from the energy at their disposal.

“If you think about solar curtailment in California during the middle of the day, all of that energy is lost. But if you're mining bitcoin, you can store that energy in bitcoin and commercialize it.”

It also shifts what has been something of a historical power imbalance between large utilities and small-time energy producers, who often have few options other than to sell or sometimes give back their excess power to the grid.

“We're basically building our own sort of energy ecosystem. We're building our own utility. At the same time, we're minting the cleanest collateral in the world,” says Smith. “And if the big utility says, well, we're not going to take all that energy. Well, guess what? I'll just mine it behind the grid. I'll mine bitcoin and then I can sell it all over the world, 24/7.”

Bitcoin mining and the next iteration of farming

Looking to the future, Carbon Country sees in itself a model to not only replicate, but to adapt based on the needs and characteristics of local ecologies and communities.

“Every place is going to be different,” says Smith. “Obviously we can't buy every farm, nor would we want to. But the idea, once we really prove out the model, is to create a 501(c)(3) that would provide education and assets to other farmers who want to take aspects of it or the whole idea and sort of localize it for themselves and execute it for themselves.”

And it is a compelling model–one that stacks layer upon layer of value-producing activity onto the same parcel of land without being purely extractive. In fact, there’s a case to be made that the model contributes at least as much to the environment and local communities as it takes in economic output.

“We're buying undervalued land because it's too small for industrial agriculture. We're keeping it ag. We're keeping the land under production, which is critically important for a country to be able to feed itself and for rural areas to keep the sense of their community,” says Smith.

“And then we're stacking these other value added synergistic things. On one acre of pasture, we can dig a wood vault, cover it up, seed it, graze sheep, build solar, apply biochar, and mine bitcoin. And that's really the ultimate kind of stacking concept, where we're adding all these different layers of value to that same piece of land in a way that also leaves it in a better place.

Possible Futures is a series of miner spotlights, highlighting some of the ways that bitcoin mining is solving real-world problems. To read more, visit https://proto.xyz/blog. To learn more about Carbon Country, visit https://www.carboncountry.us/.