​The goal of this paper is to explain the science behind EMF, the ancient farming wisdom from which it originated, as well as the modern science that is now explaining it, and how this system can be used today to make farming more sustainable and productive.

​We've teamed up with Impact Bioenergy to bring no-money-down biogas systems to California restaurants and grocery stores.

Impact Bioenergy has designed and built the first modular, affordable, small-scale commercial anaerobic digester in North America. Through a new distribution agreement with Impact Bioenergy, and financing partnerships that will allow customers to pay a monthly service fee to use the digester, Everflux will focus on building a scalable, replicable model for deploying these digesters across California.

Impact Bioenergy's HORSE digester has the capacity to process food waste coming from a large suburban restaurant, grocery store, hospital or cafeteria, and turn it into gas for water heating or cooking. The digested material ("digestate") will then be sold as a soil amendment for urban farmers. Digestate has a similar nutrient profile to cow manure, but comes out in liquid form, making it great for hydroponics.

I first contact Impact Bioenergy in the spring of 2016 after hearing of their successful Kickstarter campaign. I was interested in buying a system to do a pilot project in Toronto and launch the business then. But a major problem emerged: without any operational history (Impact Bioenergy had only built two systems at that point, and neither were running), it was impossible to find financing for such a system. So I put the idea on hold. But a year and a half later, I saw Impact Bioenergy speak at the Biocycle Refor17 conference in Portland OR, and found out that they had five systems up and running, and a sixth had just been sold to Microsoft. Now this was something that had the foundation to scale, I thought.

Five months later, after another trip to Seattle and seeing the fledgling operation Impact Bioenergy had going there, we signed a distribution agreement.

In order to scale this deployment model, Everflux will be focusing on four things: 

1) Finding a good-fit niche market in which to sell digestate as fertilizer. This, we have realized, is the key to making the distributed biogas model work - it boosts project economics from marginal to outstanding. For most large scale digesters, digestate is a liability, For various reasons, a distributed approach has a much better chance at turning the digestate into an asset. The biggest reason: each system does not product unmanageably large amounts of digestate.

2) Setting up the operational capacity to collect digestate from each system, process and package it. In order to market the digestate as fertilizer, we need a small fleet of trucks picking it up from each digester, and a small facility where we can bottle or bag the digestate for sale. As a result, Everflux's project development will take a very regional approach: we will start with the Bay Area at first, and branch out from there once we have a critical density of projects. We will eventually establish many small bottling facilities strategically placed to cover a specific region where we have projects. A hub and spoke model, like SolarCity's approach to installation.

3) Setting up the infrastructure to maintain and repair Impact Bioenergy systems. This will go hand in hand with the digestate distribution: our bottling facilities will also be operations centers, where maintenance crews can head out to nearby digesters that need work.

4) Finding a partner who will finance the projects. We've already begun talks with a financier who is interested in financing these types of projects, if we can bundle several of them together with a promise of more to come. This will necessitate approaching large chain restaurants, such as Chevy's. Panera Bread, or California Pizza Kitchen. It will also mean coming up with a highly standardized approach to project development and deployment. But with Impact Bioenergy's systems coming fully assembled in a shipping container, this prospect gets a whole lot easier.

We look forward to growing this partnership with them.

​Colonizing Mars? How about the oceans first. The company Blue Frontiers is building the world's first "Seastead" in French Polynesia. And it will also be the world's most sustainable mini-city. Everflux plans to help.

I first learned about the idea of "Seasteading" at a conference in San Leandro, CA, called Prototyping The Future. It was an apt name - I had no idea how far some of these people were already sailing into the future, The final keynote address was given by Randy Hencken, then Managing Director of the non-profit Seasteading Institute, and now also one of five founders of a for-profit company called Blue Frontiers. He spoke of "colonizing the oceans" in a way that would not only protect, but restore ocean ecosystems, help humanity adapt to climate change, and relieve the resource and environmental strain of the world's crowded land-based cities. 

I loosely followed the Seasteading Institute and subsequently Blue Frontiers' activity over the next nine months. The idea intrigued me, and the feeling that I somehow had to get involved wouldn't go away. I had always been interested in the idea of colonizing Mars, but having missed my opportunity to become an astronaut a long time ago, I felt like the possibilities of me ever being involved in Mars colonization were remote. But this... this was something much more accessible, and almost more admirable. "Let's learn how to take better care of the planet we've got, before going and messing up some other planet" a friend had once said to me about the idea of going to Mars. That sentiment stuck with me.

Then I read Joe Quirk's book, Seasteading. It outlines the entire, detailed case for Seasteading, addressing every reason for and against it. The book convinced me. This had to be the future. When I saw Joe and Randy at the Startup Societies conference in August, I offered to join what I soon learned was a large group of volunteers, envisioning how to make the first floating island a reality. Because this is not just a techno-fantasy - they already have a real project in the works.

In the last year there has been a flurry of media activity about the project. One such article appeared in the New York Times. The idea is to build a small floating platform off the coast of French Polynesia, in a special economic zone called a Seazone, that will showcase how larger floating cities could work. The French Polynesian government is right now considering legislation to legalize the Seazone, and after that Blue Frontiers will begin finalizing designs and planning construction of the project.

Did you know San Francisco has more dogs than children? Yep, approximately 120,000 of them. And while many dog owners have learned the habit of cleaning up after their dogs, that dog poop ends up in plastic bags, in the trash can. Which means eventually it ends up in a landfill.

Seeing this as a huge public nuisance, and a brown splatter on the City of San Francisco's otherwise outstanding recycling record (the city has an ambitious goal of becoming zero waste by 2020) the Recreation and Parks Department included a challenge in this year's STIR program that called on a startup to find "a park-sized, affordable solution that could convert the methane from dog poop into electricity." We applied on a whim, thinking there was a small chance we'd be accepted. Well, good things often come by surprise.

But Everflux has been focusing on building anaerobic digesters for food waste. And the difference between designing a digester for food waste and dog poop is bigger than you might think. How then, would we pivot to dog poo?