G20 to Phase out fossil Fuel Subsidies

This is one step that I can agree with and that every country can enable as a common action. If all are doing this, there is no lobby argument that stands at all.

Now if we could now do the same thing with agricultural subsidies world wide making it a condition for maintaining the right to trade a given commodity. The subsidy game has been a way to play beggar my neighbor and has merely led to mutual damage unless you think free trade in agricultural goods between Europe and north America is unsustainable.

In fact the developed countries have all subsidized their agriculture to a huge degree an a competition to the bottom. This has meant that we have a form of consumer subsidy going on that is distortive. It has made it difficult for everyone else to break into our markets.

The good news is that developing countries are getting wise to the game and are starting to create working offsets to move their product and their own subsidies of course. In time, it will all sort itself out.

In the meantime, China and India have robust agricultural sectors whose expansion in output is easily keeping up with demand. A famine threatens in India and it is easy to divert global reserves to the Indian market.

Anyway, the simple application of a price guarantee for wind power and geothermal power will swiftly see the carbon based industry replaced though simple replacement as plants cycle to the end of their lives. Even early windmills are now been replaced with better gear.

As I have posted, we are going to see the oil supply drop from 85 million barrels per day to a stable 50 million barrels per day or less over the next decade or so. That is why the explorers are finally tackling the likes of politically volatile West Africa and just about any place with a hope in an attempt to sustain present levels. The shoe really has not dropped yet but it will take very little to expose our vulnerability and force the globe into oil rationing.

G20 leaders agree to phase out fossil fuel subsidies

by Staff Writers

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (AFP) Sept 23, 2009

http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/G20_leaders_agree_to_phase_out_fossil_fuel_subsidies_999.html

Leaders of emerging and developed nations agreed Friday to a US plan to phase out government subsidies for fossil fuel blamed for global warming, a joint statement said.

"We commit to rationalize and phase out over the medium term inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption," the leaders said after a two-day Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh.

The leaders asked their energy and finance ministers to "develop implementation strategies and time frames" for the phasing out of the subsidies.

"We call on all nations to adopt policies that will phase out such subsidies worldwide," the statement said.

The leaders however underlined "the importance of providing those in need with essential energy services, including through the use of targeted cash transfers and other appropriate mechanisms."

The US plan was part of efforts to combat climate change, enhance energy security, improve public health and the environment, promote faster economic growth and support more effective targeting of government resources for the poor, officials said.

Key G20 nations China, India, Russia and Brazil reportedly are among the top spenders of fossil fuel subsidies and are unlikely to easily agree to any plans to slash them.

Slavery Epidemic

Reading a book on the cultural development of Brazil, I came away with a disquieting train of thought. The first aspect that became clear was that the native population was healthy and robust and remained so for most of the first century of contact in the contact coastal zone. It was reported on by many witnesses from all aspects. It is apparent that epidemic type depopulation would have been remarked upon. Yet these reports are missing.

That throws into question the whole idea of Indian depopulation by epidemic decimation. Particularly so as it mimics the experience shortly afterwards on the North American coast. There again we get reports of disease losses but nothing quite so catastrophic as endured by the remote tribes of the north west in the nineteenth century.

In Canada, the native cultures acquired a valuable trapping lifeway that secured their living in a way that was clearly superior to that abandoned and it is fair to say that the population actually thrived. In the USA this lifeway was quickly displaced and conflict reduced the viability of the original agrarian lifeway.

The point to all this was that the real epidemic was slave taking by the technically superior Europeans rather than disease in general.

While disease will usually kill off the very young and the very old with the exception of influenza allowing easy replenishment, slave trading preferentially takes the young adults with a full working life ahead of them. Rather obviously, if you constantly remove the breeding population to the coastal plantations, there will be no replenishment.

Population replenishment after a pass by an epidemic is surprisingly swift.

Recall that a mother is able to produce several offspring if there are plenty of resources available. The early reports from Brazil emphasize the richness of the indigenous food supply and the obvious excess of population that supported a culture of ritual cannibalism. This obviously acted to stabilize an expansive semi agrarian tribal system. It was not occasional and once slave taking began, almost certainly led to an acceleration of the population collapse.

This is also a disease that works well upcountry to supply manpower to the coast. Thus the Indians themselves did the bulk of the slave acquisition work.

Once a person was brought into slavery, their fecundity also collapsed because it cost the slave owner money to have children around and cared for when the value of a slave was cheap. It seems unlikely that slaves in Brazil maintained natural replacement. What replacement took place also likely took place at the hands of the slave owners producing hybrids even less susceptible to disease.

Thus the economic pressure of the cost of children and a low resale value would have passed the Indian population through a managed population collapse in which most of the survivors after several generations would be hybrids. In the end, slave trading replaced cannibalism.

Pineapples and Cannibalism

This article, though interesting because of the unique development history of the pineapple and the insight it casts on the lack of natural sweetening in Europe in particular is interesting to our efforts because of the description of the Indian culture of Brazil. Whatever one may think of them, they were populous. It is also quite arguable that cannibalism was a convenient response to population pressure.

Prior to the contact, there is little evidence of pandemic plagues decimating the population. I make only an exception for a collapse in North America taking place several hundred years before first contact which smells like the impact of fresh European contact that was simply brief and unreported.

We have evidence of extensive Bronze Age contract but also little evidence of a plague pandemic history during this period in old world records. Perhaps that was a result of Palace cultures and minimal interaction at the ground level. That is hardly supported though by the history of the post contact population collapse which proceeded in waves to strip both continents.

Of course, a collapse may well have occurred during initial contact in the early Bronze Age and this was simply recovered from unlike the situation after first contact. It is worth noting that the Pacific Northwest avoided collapse until the nineteenth century because of geographic barriers. This gave us a first hand record of the indigenous collapse and also is showing us that once the disease is eliminated that human populations will smartly rebound.

I do not think that Pacific Northwest populations have fully rebounded and many historic villages will never be reestablished to our loss, but the end of the recovery is surely in sight. I also suspect that Cree populations of Northeast America are likely superior to pre contact populations. It is much harder to say that elsewhere.

This reference to the Brazil of 1492 shows a thriving population that conducted tribal warfare and never wasted the results. The story was exactly the same across the water in southern Africa. I once read a book recording the experiences of a English seaman caught by the Portuguese and sold into slavery in Angola, who ran with a Zulu like Impi and who lived their life. You could not make it up, yet the Zulus two hundred years later were confirmation.

Monday, 19 January 2009

THE HISTORY OF THE PINEAPPLE

http://gardenofeaden.blogspot.com/2009/01/history-of-pineapple.html

Born in 1541 to a middle-class wool weaver and part-time cheese salesman, the great Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus has the legacy of one of the worlds greatest visionaries. Inspired by his beliefs, his journeys of incredible discovery caused an intellectual transformation that ushered in the modern age. Although he is now credited with history’s ‘most recent’ discovery of the Americas (the 11th century Icelandic explorer Leif Ericsson is currently the earliest documented European to set foot in mainland America) the fruits of his travels have also made him the accidental father of modern glasshouse production. A strange association indeed, but a feat that would never have been impossible were it not for his mis-calculation of the size of the Earth (in particular the Eurasian continent) and poor grasp of maritime navigation.

Inspired from works by Ptolemy, Pierre d’Ailly and the ‘Travels of Marco Polo’ Columbus wrongly concluded that Asia could be reached easier and far quicker by using a western route across the Atlantic. His conviction was soon to become an obsession and so he began to petition the various European Royal heads of state in order to finance his ’Enterprise of the Indies’. Beginning first with Portugal, then France and even England, he was refused time after time mainly on the grounds of the huge costs that an exhibition like this would encounter. Eventually, after already rejecting him once before, it was Queen Isabella of Spain who granted him the commission he required, making his dream of finding a western route to Asia a reality.

History was sealed on August 3rd 1492 when a small fleet comprising of the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina set sail for the first of four voyages of discovery exploring the New World. However it was during his second voyage to the South American mainland that he stumbled across the indigenous Tupi-Guarani Indians. This was the encounter that was to change the course of history, triggering a chain of events which for centuries captured imaginations across continental Europe. By doing so he set in motion a desire for massive investment and innovation, the like of which may never be seen again.

The Tupi-Guarani Indians were the dominant civilisation in the areas that Columbus visited, inhabiting the Brazilian coast from the mouth of the river Amazon, down to Cananéia, and including large sections of the Amazon basin. They enjoyed an advanced culture that practiced what we still regard as modern agricultural and horticultural techniques including the selective breeding of plants to increase flavour and yields. Unfortunately their culture also included a taste for human flesh, the dish of choice being captured prisoners of war.

Their whole culture and government was based on the act of cannibalism, and following a successful raid on a neighbouring tribe, prisoners would be brought back to the village to be fattened up. A few weeks later an elaborate party/ritual would be arranged, after which the prisoner is summarily executed by a blow to the back of the head. He was then skinned and cooked with seasonal fruits and vegetables. A small piece of flesh was then served to each member of the tribe so that they could gain the spiritual strength of the unfortunate victim.

Despite these rather gruesome eating habits the Tupi-Guarani Indians are also the first humans to encounter and domesticate the pineapple. This highly specialised fruit also has a unique characteristic, which in one way is quite poetic when you consider its ancestry. It has the only known source of bromelein, an enzyme that can digest protein. In other words the pineapple has quite literally flesh-eating properties. In fact over the years there have been numerous reports where eating pineapples has caused an itchy or burning sensation to the mouth. In extreme cases this has caused the lips and internal parts of the mouth to bleed.

Their first encounter with a pineapple occurred in November 1493 during the second voyage to the Caribbean region. After securing anchor off the volcanic island of Guadeloupe, Columbus led a small party ashore to study what appeared to be a deserted tribal village. Among wooden pillars spiralled with serpent carvings, his crew found large pots filled with human body parts, accompanied nearby by several piles of freshly foraged fruits and vegetables. Undaunted or perhaps just extremely hungry, the party helped themselves to the non-human aspect to the meal, enjoying in particular a curious new fruit which they had found. They described it as having ‘…an abrasive, segmented exterior like a pine cone and a firm interior pulp like an apple...’ Luckily they were able to return to their ship before the tribesmen returned.

During his fourth and final voyage to the West Indies in 1502 Columbus made his way down to the Isla de Pinos off of the coat of Honduras. Here that he met, along with his brother Bartolomeo, native traders travelling with a large canoe filled with merchandise. It was described at the time to be ‘… as long as a galley…’ It’s believed that this was the moment local tribesmen first traded fresh pineapples to Europeans eventually reaching mainland Europe for the first time in November of that year.

The Renaissance Europe to which Columbus returned to was a civilization largely bereft of common sweets. Sugar refined from cane was a rare commodity and at the time had to be imported at great cost from both the Middle East and the Orient. Without modern methods of refrigeration or transportation, fresh fruit was also scarce with orchard-grown produce only available in limited numbers during their harvest periods.

Once safely returned to Europe, Columbus’s succulently sweet pineapple became an instant hit.

Overnight it had become an item of both celebrity and curiosity for royal gourmets and professional horticulturist alike. Unfortunately combining its notoriously short shelf life with a 1-2 month sea journey made obtaining the fruit for Europe almost an impossibility. Its extreme rarity meant that the pineapple quickly became a symbol of wealth and luxury, but despite the best efforts of European gardeners it was nearly two centuries before they were able to mimic the perfect environment in which to grow and then bring to fruition a pineapple plant. It was during the 1600s, when the pineapple was still regarded as a rare and coveted commodity that King Charles II of England actually commissioned an official portrait by Hendrick Danckurts to immortalize him in an act of royal privilege. The theme naturally was to have the King receiving a pineapple as a gift from his head gardener John Rose.

The race was on across Europe to be the first to produce a home bred fruit, but the biggest obstacle that contemporary gardeners faced was that the pineapple could only fruit in a tropical climate. Temperature was the crucial factor as the mother plants are unable to survive frost and tended to go dormant when the soil temperatures dropped below about 70°F. At the same time they needed a minimum air temperatures of between 60-70°F, high light levels, humidity and a soil rich in nutrients. This was the challenge facing nursery men all over Europe, the main problem being able to maintain these high soil and air temperatures throughout the year. The key was to use the heat properties of maturing compost, but this had to be properly researched and refined as at the time they couldn’t get it warm enough. Eventually they realised that differing compositions affected the rate at which the waste matter broke down, and that this was directly responsible for the heat it generated.

Luckily the gardeners found that by using a 1:2 balance of green (leafy) and brown (woody) composts they could achieve temperatures of between 55 and 65 degrees Centigrade. Unfortunately not only was this still too cold for pineapple production it also did little for raising the humidity. Eventually they discovered a successful mix that was largely comprised of tan bark (Lithocarpus densiflorus). This was a North American evergreen tree related to the Beech family and greatly used in the leather industry due to its tannin rich bark. This produced the richer and far moister compost they required while maintaining a higher temperature compared to traditional composts. By achieving this they had overcome the first hurdle from which the industry could take its next leap forward.

The race was set, and the quest to grow this luxury fruit in Europe continued to be a major force for a series of technological developments in glasshouse design. Originally growers used what was available to them which were principally sixteenth and seventeenth centuries orangeries. Although perfectly suitable for over-wintering relatively undemanding citrus fruit, they had solid roofs, primitive heating, and windows not much larger than you would find in a normal house. It wasn’t long before these designs had proved completely inadequate for providing the year-round heat, humidity and higher light conditions required for pineapple fruit initiation and so we began to see the introduction of sunken tanbark hot beds were enclosed by large glass frames.

It was William Parker who in 1723 took tanbark pits technology to the next level by supplementing them with hot air flues. Housed in what was then the cutting edge technology of a ‘modern’ greenhouse, this was the first time that a specific environment had been created with the ability of being controlled throughout the year. This is generally thought to be the first true ‘pinery’ but it was Agnes Black, a Dutch woman, who grew the first European grown pineapple in 1687. The first British grown pineapple didn’t appear until 1721, grown by Henry Telende, gardener to the wealthy Dutchman Sir Matthew Decker. As this was prior to William Parker’s hot air system Henry had no choice other than to keep moving his plants from the pit into a conservatory causing him to loose months of precious growth every year.

From about 1760 it became standard practice to culture pineapples and grapevines together in ‘pinery-vineries’, which supposedly gave each species the mutual benefits of heat and shade. This practice must have been successful as it became standard practice for over 50 years; in fact there is an illustration by George Tod in 1810 shows a pinery-vinery of 1810, very similar in design to one built at Penpont eight years later. Other innovations, such as glazed sidewalls and front flues also appeared.

By the 1850s pineapples production had been perfected, growing on a three year cycle; After succeeding in getting the suckers or crowns to root in the first year they were transplanted into a ‘succession bed’ to be grown on for a second year. After that they would be transplanted into a ‘fruiting bed’ for the third. Pinery houses were often separated into two sections divided by a partition wall. This enabled each section to be individually heated allowing each environment could be controlled separately.

Pineries and the smaller pine pits continued to evolve in parallel; an excellent and sophisticated pine pit was discovered and has now been restored at Heligan, but the larger pineries have almost entirely disappeared, with only a few partial features around to show us their existence. In fact the National Trust is now involved in an ambitious plan at Tatton Park where they intend to use reconstructive archaeology to rebuild the pinery instead of their usual building conservation policy which would keep these remnants as they are in perpetuity.

Of course today pineapple growing is big business with over 15 million tons of produce being harvested by 80 countries every year. Each one sells for less than a couple of pounds, bought by people without a single thought as to the fascinating history of its origins. And why not, even on his death bed Columbus had no idea as to the value his pineapple brought to the world, but to be fair neither did he know what part of the world he had discovered it from.

Shadi Bushra on Death of Monroe Doctrine

This article is a wake up call for all of us in North America. We have been utterly complacent in our private and public dealings between ourselves and the southern continent.

Curiously, I have just recently read the biography of Lula and if you do not have a clue, please google Lula. I took strong encouragement from his emergence. Real democracy is working in Brazil, and real progressive steps are been taken. It is never fast enough, but the potential is palpable.

Brazil is rising as another super economy, not unlike India and China with appropriate political reliability to go with it. Brazil’s rising middle class will soon dominate the remainder of South America and establish a pan S. American consensus in dealing with the North and elsewhere.

The day of apparent heavy handed USA interventionism is fast disappearing and this is for the better. The US never wanted it, but confronted by yet another version of broken governance it was always unavoidable.

We should do all that is possible to welcome a Brazil led South America onto the world stage and greater international responsibility. The sooner Obama embraces Lula the better for all.

http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/article.php?article_id=293

The Death of the Monroe Doctrine

January, 2009
by Shadi Bushra

Some hundred and fifty years ago, President James Monroe declared the entire Western Hemisphere the dominion of the United States of America. His none too subtle warnings to the European powers to keep out of Latin American affairs led to the budding of policies that would use enormous military, economic, and political pressure from Washington to dictate to Latin America the terms of their relationship.

Today, however, we are seeing a Latin America whose weariness and frustration with the United States is amounting to a sharp divergence of policies as our neighbors to the south pursue their national and regional interests with little regard for the United States’ opinion.

From Venezuela’s confrontational Chavez to Brazil’s more moderate Lula, leaders throughout Latin America are finding new partners on issues from development to defense. This November, Russian warships engaged in naval exercises with Venezuela followed by a visit to Cuba, the first such excursion to the Caribbean since the Cold War. In the same period of time, Chinese President Hu Jintao signed a free-trade agreement with Peru, and Brazil invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a state visit.

In response to these and other diplomatic overtures from rivals, Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs said, “We don’t subscribe to the hydraulic theory of diplomacy that when one country is up, the other is down - that if China and Russia are in the area our influence has somehow waned.” In any case, it is no longer possible to say that the United States is the only power which Latin America can, or particularly wants to do business with.

As our international image and with it our global influence has decreased, many countries are realizing that overly friendly or close relations with the United States are no longer necessary to their survival.Beyond such overt encroachments by competitors, much of America’s own policy towards Latin America has led to a cooling of relations between Washington and much of the region.

We have continued to insist that NAFTA and CAFTA have promoted growth despite evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, bilateral agreements with Colombia, Panama, and Peru are pending specific conditions or Congressional approval.

Despite the free trade agreements in place and under negotiation, the de facto death of the US-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) seems to be indicative of a broader trend in Latin America which recognizes that we live in an incredibly globalized world where capital and markets can be found just as easily in China or Russia as they can in the United States.

While Russia has been focused largely on military sales, China has kept itself open to any and all opportunities. Two-way trade with the region shot up twelvefold since 1995 to $110 billion last year, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. China’s share of the region’s imports also jumped, to 24 percent from 9.8 percent in 1990, while the U.S. share shrunk to 34 percent from 43 percent.

Additionally, China has offered loans with far less conditions than international or American institutions.However Latin America is not only looking for assistance from America’s global competitors; the region is increasingly turning inward to solve its problems. The economic crisis and the global powers’ uncoordinated reactions reaffirmed that developing countries would have to unite if they were to weather this economic storm, and the political and social challenges that came with it.

A recent regional summit put a much finer point on it by excluding the United States and inviting Cuba, which Washington has attempted to make a pariah in the hemisphere. Raul Castro’s presence and the warm welcome extended him by the summit’s host, Brazil’s President Lula, and their counterparts from the 31 other countries represented marked a sharp deviation from Cuba’s 1961 expulsion from the Organization of American States (OAS) at the United State’s behest.

The summit, which called for greater economic integration (including very vocal and at times confrontational calls to lift the embargo on Cuba), a regional bank for countries to turn to before the despised IMF and World Bank, and reducing dependence on US arms by improving South American defense industries. To some, this summit gives the image of a region that is turning increasingly hostile towards that US.

But in reality, no leader in the area is demanding anything from the United States beyond respect of their sovereignty and their right to make decisions in the best interest of their people. Where those interests are in agreement with ours, as they often are, we can work in concert to achieve common goals. Where they conflict, we must realize that we can no longer impose our will upon the Latin American people. That, at the very least, has been made thoroughly clear.

Louis Sheehan on Early Terra Preta

A quick review here on the subject of terra preta and we are sort of due. New information is this tale about confederate soldiers who took up farming on such soils and discovered their value and obviously told the story to a research group.

They pass over the making of the biochar as if it were a simple matter of smoldering wood and brush. If only that were true, everyone would be doing this for thousands of years worldwide.

And no, the microorganisms do not turn organic matter into dark earth. It that were true we all would be living on miles of dark earth. They turn it into food which they consume. In fact, the problem with tropical soils is that it is rapidly degraded by the biology leaving depleted nutrient poor soils. Terra preta intercepts that process and holds the nutrients.

We associate slash and burn with primitive agriculture. That is quit true as far as it goes. What is not understood is that a primitive lifestyle is the result of slash and burn. Slash and burn was not very easy until it was possible to buy a steel axe and a machete.

Thus earlier cultures were static and mastered their soils while building up huge communities.

By Louis Sheehan esquire

Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, a research expedition encountered a group of Confederate expatriates living in Brazil. The refugees had quickly taken to growing sugarcane on plots of earth that were darker and more fertile than the surrounding soil, Cornell University’s Charles Hartt noted in the 1870s.

The same dark earth, terra preta in Portuguese, is now attracting renewed scientific attention for its high productivity, mysterious past, and capacity to store carbon. Researchers on Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis presented evidence that new production of the fertile soil could aid agriculture and limit global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Prehistoric farmers created dark earth, perhaps intentionally, when they worked charcoal and nutrient-rich debris into Amazonian soils, which are naturally poor at holding nutrients. The amendments produced “better nutrient retention and soil fertility,” says soil scientist Johannes Lehmann of Cornell.

Charcoal forms when organic matter smolders, or burns at low temperatures and with limited oxygen. Nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium readily adhere to charcoal, and the combination creates a good habitat for microorganisms. The soil microbes transform the materials into dark earth, says geographer William I. Woods of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

If some of today’s Amazonian farmers were to use smoldering fires to produce dark earth rather than clear fields with common slash-and-burn methods, they “would not only dramatically improve soil and increase crop production but also could provide a long-term sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide,” says Lehmann.

Slash-and-burn land clearing releases about 97 percent of the carbon that’s in vegetation. Smoldering the same fuel to form charcoal releases only about 50 percent of the original carbon, Lehmann previously reported. The rest of that carbon remains in dark earth for centuries. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us

However, dark earth requires extra nutrients, such as those in compost. International agreements on greenhouse gases don’t provide financial incentives for farmers to make the effort to create dark earth, Woods says.

Nevertheless, ongoing field experiments in Brazil suggest that the fertility associated with terra preta could provide its own incentive, reports Beáta Madari of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil contains a wide range of dark earths with varying compositions. The scientists found differences between the soils used for ancient backyard gardens, which received more nutrients, and soils from distant fields.

Farmers of the time “certainly would have immediately learned about the properties of that soil, however [it] formed,” says anthropologist Michael J. Heckenberger of the University of Florida in Gainesville. But the knowledge about how to make dark earth disappeared after contact with Europeans decimated the indigenous population.

Making Primitive Biochar

Those who have followed my blog know that I proposed a method for producing biochar that was plausible inside the limitations placed on an antique society living in the Amazon rainforest. Key to the time and place was the use of maize as the principal source material. That this was so was confirmed by published pollen studies and by more recent translations of sixteenth century reports from southern Brazil which described widespread maize culture.

When I began my thought experiment, the presence of maize seemed very unlikely in view of the known dynamics of rainforest soils. Yet I needed a plant that produced packable waste that could be handled without steel tools. Wood was both high cost in human energy inputs and very resistant to charring and crushing. Most other crops simply failed to produce both a crop and much biomass. No primitive farmer was going to plant a stand-alone char feedstock and lose a season.

This is where corn or maize came in. It produced a stable easy to store high volume crop that also produced perhaps ten tons per acre of corn stover. This stover was also very packable because there are no branches. What made it more attractive was the root ball which is in the form of a disc and is often very easy to pull out of the soil. Thus a field could be stripped of its ripe corn and then stripped easily of its stover.

Stacking the stalks was easily accomplished and using the root balls to form an outer wall simply a matter of paying attention. The key idea was to provide an outer shell of mud that closed off the packed stover. Now they did not have a sheet of metal foil to add another heat resistant air tight layer, so it is likely that they slathered on a thin layer of river clay to form a air tight seal. Again field experiments will inform us as to the extent that this is all necessary.

At the end of the day, without any tools, we have a thin clay dome or a mud dome enclosing ten tons of packed stover.

This is then loaded with a charge of burning coals. I have considered top down but suspect that simply feeding a charge in through the bottom perhaps along a narrow trench will be good enough. A small amount of air will be drawn to the charge maintaining the heat production and the produced heat will steadily reduce the maize very quickly. Gasses will be captured and ignite as the burn progresses steadily reducing the load.

Eventually the whole load will collapse upon which it will be smothered with more dirt.

I had originally envisaged this process taking many hours, however corn stover is like paper and merely needs to be heated for it to curl up and quickly decompose.

Ten tons or one acres production would give us three tons of biochar which is ample for that one acre, particularly if one goes the extra step of creating seed hills on only a third of the surface. In one season, you are in business. The one remaining mystery is why this method failed to make it out of the Amazon, because it would have nicely augmented the three sisters throughout the Americas. Or perhaps it did and we simply never noticed or our steel got there first and disease got there first.