Bakary Jatta in Africa

This was a very welcome posting this past September from Bakary Jatta somewhere in Africa who is working to improve his soils. Two quick lessons arise from his hands on reporting that can easily escape even the most diligent investigator. The easy one is that necessary moisture is incredibly erratic making a thirsty crop like corn very problematic.

On the other hand, in the Amazon and for that matter the Congo were moisture is not an issue, I was actually surprised that corn was able to prosper in soils that are swiftly depleted of nutrients by excessive rainfall. Of course the magic ingredient was the terra preta soil base that held the nutrients.

The second item made very clear is that a tropical soil and biome is incredibly voracious toward the organic content of the soil itself, explaining the low fertility of such soils. I am more and more inclined to think that our historic concept of soil creation and maintenance is very wrong headed.

We have been used to clearing forest and turning the related soils into farmland. We never quite understood the soil equation itself. With this change the whole structure collapses to that sufficient to support the annual crops we rely on. I was taught that these soils had lost heavily from erosion which is not true at all. It was merely reduced by the resident biota as happens spectacularly in tropical Africa.

The power of the biochar intervention comes from direct nutrient retention and perhaps derivative biomass retention supported by the improved nutrient profile. My proposed earthen corn kiln system has the key advantage of producing enough char to properly set up a field with one crop. No other crop is likely up to that level of productivity. And it can be done with no tools except perhaps a basket and a garbage can lid.

European efforts to produce familiar soil profiles in the tropics have likely been bone headed because of this lack of natural soil integrity. Introducing char has been proven in the Amazon as the way to overcome this problem. I also think it will revolutionize temperate agriculture, allowing us to restore the thick fertile primeval forest soils.

Greetings to all esteemed list members.

The list is so active that it is very difficult to digest all the submissions. There has been a request for a simple recipe of producing and applying TP. Very good if that becomes a focus. Most of the world's people would probably do something about sequestering CO2, increased food production, and conserve the planet's environment, if they are aware of the urgency and magnitude of the problem to start with and if they have the means to do so.

At least the list members have the opportunity to be more informed. Having a different focus and possible entrenched ideas may delay coming up with some of the simple answers that are available for doing something big, or small, as individuals.

As an individual I am not in a position to produce tons of biochar, but I do produce some by pyrolysis using a 200 liter drum. A piece of pipe at the bottom lets the volatile gasses provide the heat to continue the process after starting with an external fuel supply. My feed stock is agricultural waste and the trimmings from a modified agro forestry system. Don't ask for proof or research results, my mind is made up that my trees are using up some CO2 and continue to do so as I keep trimming them.

Then we have this problem of soil erosion and leaching plus a host of other problems. Soil erosion is checked by using Vetiver grass on properly spaced low contour bunds. This grass has been successfully used world wide and the technology is simple for any normal person to apply. The roots grow straight down to a depth of 3 meters. It sequesters CO2 continuously and increasingly from three months after the first establishment. It probably out-performs trees but I am not going to argue if anyone says no. Of course, as it filters the runoff water, it deposits the debris and topsoil from the higher ground and thereby increases soil fertility and multiplies soil organisms. Don't ask for proof, I am observing it personally. Not the micro size, but I like those worms!

Now remains the leaching and losing all that water into the soil in a matter of minutes after a cloud burst. Organic material seems to melt away quickly during the rainy season. In the dry season the termites take care of the rougher stuff. Some of the mulch like the Vetiver grass lasts longer. No doubt the mineral content of the effluent from the Biogas digester also leaches out but the soil organisms must be protected from high heat and drought. Some species of living mulch may survive the dry season and termites. But I think I have to make biochar production a priority if I want a long term improvement on this site. Just warn me if there is proof that there is any danger of applying bio char. I doubt I will be able to overdose the soil with it at my level of production.

Now doing all this is very time consuming and my neighbors are definitely going to spend the extra time and energy doing this unless there is a significant increase of production noticeable. Anyone with money here will hire the tractor and apply the chemical fertilizer. They want results now and even if they know the long term consequence, they are not likely to change. I hope the members of the list are going to come up with answers that are applicable to the peasants of the world and deliver the message to them as well. There are sooo many of them. Their number can make a difference to the planet. Personally I don't think the 'developed world' will as they are tied up with the world economic system that leaves the 'poor' outside looking in.

I hope our friend from Swaziland gets good advice. Nice country there, would not want it to get sacrificed too like most of the third world.

Bakary Jatta

Dear Robert,

There is a problem keeping up with the volumes of information available on the net. Having an unreliable and very slow dial-up connection it is not possible to even download for later reading the material. Some friends sent me huge files with interesting funnies or philosophical homilies. At one time it took three days to open up my Google account so I could delete the files and was able to retrieve the rest of my communications. This eats up a major part of my limited income, and therefore have to request my friends to just send subject information and links.

I noted your contributions on the Terrapreta list via the digests I receive. My situation requires I glean whatever may be applicable in this particular location. Even if our long past cousins in the Amazon were using corn stover and or other materials, corn production in our poor soils and unpredictable rainfall patterns just does not apply. Even in other parts of Africa corn production replaced traditional crops and the resulting crop failures caused frequent famines. Corn here is grown for early food in the season and money. It is mostly grown close to the compounds where rubbish is thrown. Hardly ever do I see a healthy stand in fields.

My priority for the last twenty years has been to restore and improve soil fertility. Organic material is scarce and it takes a lot of time to find mulching material to make the soils protective of soil organisms, once they are re-introduced. So terrapreta alone just will not do the job, but appears to be a valuable aid in the process of restoring soil fertility and creating an improved micro climate, like an oasis.

My vision of adapting to climate change is just that, we need to create survival areas, as the point of no return has already been reached in many areas of the world. It is a good thing nature is so generous. If the most dangerous species of the planet starts using its intelligence to live in harmony with it, some recovery over a period of time will eminently possible. But some changes will be permanent and we will have to adapt accordingly.

Warm regards,

Bakary Jatta

Greatest Human Ecological Disaster

The global warming debate is driven by growing public unease throughout the world over our visible disregard for good husbandry practices in our industrial economy. It is expressing itself most clearly over the CO2 issue, even though this is most likely a red herring. The direct linkage to global warming is at least controversial, and I for one have a great deal of faith in the Earth’s carbon cycle and its ability to restore such imbalances.

More importantly, the ecological movement is about good husbandry. And strange as it may sound, it is not about conservation. Mankind has already transformed most of the environment to serve its needs thousands of years ago, and mankind’s task increasingly is to improve on this legacy. The only areas that we can rightly conserve are inimical to human habitation and even that often needs the fine hand of good husbandry practice.

With the true wild a policy of haven maintenance must be implemented to properly manage human exploitation. An ideal model of this is to overlay a checkerboard and designate every ninth square as a haven. Of course in practice, this must be negotiated and studied in detail to ensure proper sizing sufficient to the various needs. For example, it makes plenty more sense to preserve old growth forests as a corridor along river beds. Once stake holders understand what is at stake, it can sort itself out quickly.

Let us put this argument in reverse. Extinction is the direct result of a loss of habitat havens. Distributed havens of old growth forests sufficient to support the spotted owl ends threats to that species and as the forests recover their range naturally expands. If we learn to manage havens then our industrial scale exploitation can be recovered from.

Remember, the bison succumbed to the global shoe leather market. Had havens not existed in Canada, the current 500,000 animal herd would simply not exist. Today that herd is on the way back to its millions and people living today will live to see many millions of bison on the prairie because it is simply a better meat animal for that particular climate. I also expect to see the bison introduced into the steppes of central Asia, restoring the native bison hunted to extinction thousands of years ago. That is good husbandry.

It came as a complete surprise to me to learn that the areal extent of the terra preta in the Amazon basin equals that of France. If this is true, then the acreage and the corn and cassava culture would easily have supported massive populations equal to that of contemporaneous India and China. What really stunned me is the fact that if it was not for the soil itself, we would have no evidence whatsoever that such a culture even existed. The Amazon was a lousy place to build permanent structures that could be found in the jungle, although we now will be looking.

What I find most sobering is that tens of millions of individuals have lived theirs lives and passed leaving almost no trace of their existence. How often has this happened globally over the past 10,000 years? Societies do not build with stone unless they are highly organized so a lack of such evidence is very misleading. The so called Stone Age for example did an excellent job of leaving evidence of its existence behind, even though a better name would be the wood and bone age. I have no difficulty setting out to construct a very sufficient tool kit with those two items as the Indians in the Amazon do to this day.

When copper became available and later iron, both metals were too valuable to throw out, so the material was constantly recycled. Yet populations expanded and social complexity increased. The only evidence left would be in the form of pottery. You can also bet that even broken pottery had some commercial value and was largely recycled.

We all know that large populations existed in the Middle East and even Europe, simply because we have looked hard enough. The Sahara desert represents several million square miles and it was once populated and the climate was amenable to agriculture. At least they raised goats. Recall today that the southern edge of this desert currently houses 100,000,000 people in conditions almost as technically primitive as 6,000 years ago on perhaps ten percent of the Saharan littoral. The fools still raise goats.

It has been argued that the collapse of the Sahara was a natural disaster. I suspect that just the opposite is true. It was instead the greatest human caused ecological disaster ever. It is as if China or India disappeared abruptly. Of course we do not know to what extent the desert was fully covered with vegetation. Since an extensive lake system existed I am inclined to err on the side of a nearly one hundred percent coverage, however fragile and terribly susceptible to easy devastation by the grazing of goats.

It is just now in our power to restore this desert back to human agriculture and general fertility just as it is possible to restore the terra preta fields of the Amazon to agriculture. It would be nice to actually absorb that big chunk of solar energy hitting the Sahara and bouncing back out. And a Sahara restored can support a couple of billion people at least.

One hundred million pre Columbian Indian Population

I came across this item on terra preta that adds to our knowledge while describing its importance.

The first fact that jumps out is the estimate of the soil’s distribution and scope. The fertility of this soil means that we can deduct a population base associated with this environment of possibly as high as one hundred million. Certainly a magnitude of between twenty to thirty million is very conservative. I make this conclusion based on the fact that a family can operate a five acre farm of corn and cassava, producing sufficient staple foodstuffs to support them.

The high population density, not unlike the rice fields of South Asia, was terribly vulnerable to contagious diseases and a swift collapse would have brought the human wolves down on top of the survivors. Our own experience with the effect of such onslaughts and more importantly their swift repetition, informs us of the reasons or total disappearance of the indigenous populations.

The only survivors would have been those who took to the forest in small separated bands and avoided contact. I think that there was some remnant survival although I am at a loss to explain the lack of informants with access to the underlying knowledge.

The second fact is the idea that of leaving a layer of the terra preta soil so that it might restore itself. Nice thought, but there is no way that the char will be replicated by biological action. However, it is quite plausible that the rapid addition of new material to the soil could be stabilized by the remaining char in the soil through the normal mixing caused by biological action. The percentage of char would decline, ultimately to a minimum level.

This is an issue well worth doing a lot of research on since it tells us that the creation of terra preta will get a huge hand from Mother Nature. My suggestion of creating biochar seed hills is more beneficial than at first thought. A concentrated hill occupies only twenty five percent of the space available, yet biological mixing will possibly build up the hills and cause the zone of influence to expand rather than contract as one would at first expect.

It is also noteworthy that the suggestion was made of something called ‘slash and char’, whatever that could be. It is clear however that the source material was the crop residues as I have been stating in previous postings. Thinking that Stone Age equipped man was going to hack down trees to make biochar is ludicrous. Girdle and kill and burn down to get started are things he could do. After that he relied on his crops for feedstock.

I have already posted on the viability of using corn stover to make an earthen field kiln that produces biochar in abundance. This article simply adds detail to the picture.

It is becoming clearer that the real population of the Americas was far greater than we have ever guessed. Corn culture certainly supported huge populations, including large expanding populations in the Mississippi Valley. Their collapse began a lot earlier than 1492. European visitors were able to make one way trips long before Columbus figured out how to return. And a boatload of your typical common cold and flu would actually decimate any population concentrations as could still happen on isolated communities.

It would not surprise me that legends of the Indians rising and destroying visiting traders before 1492 was driven by the obvious relationship between strangers and fatal disease.

Anyway, enjoy this article that quotes extensively from Charles C Mann’s article in Atlantic Monthly.

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Amazonian Terra Preta

Once in a while you run across something that challenges just about everything you thought you knew. “Terra preta” (Portuguese for “black earth”) are anomalous deposits of deep, rich soil found in large pockets of land throughout the Amazon. Once thought to be 100% comprised of thin, fragile soil that would immediately desertify if the trees were removed, it now turns out there are significant sections of Amazonia where this terra preta is abundant. But the biggest mystery is this: The Amazon’s best soil, terra preta, possibly was deliberately created by Native Americans.

As put forth in 2002 in a lengthy article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “1491” by Charles C. Mann, there is a growing body of evidence that the indigenous population of the Americas in pre-colombian times was far greater than is typically estimated.

In Mann’s report several thought provoking bits of evidence are presented: The great mass of carrier pigeons that filled the skies and the great masses of bison that dominated the endless prairies in the 18th century were not always there - if they had always been there, in archeological sites we would see their bones in far greater abundance. Instead they were “outbreak species,” whose numbers mushroomed in the wake of human demographic collapse. Read the article for more arguments supporting this new theory - which basically says the impact of European disease on Native American populations was far, far greater than previously conjectured, and in fact abruptly destroyed a network of complex urban civilizations numbering well over 100 million people.

The presence of Amazonian terra preta is another piece of evidence allegedly supporting this theory, because the placement of these deposits of charcoal rich black earth are not explained without human intervention. The theory holds that this black earth was created by a process called “slash and char,” something very distinct from slash and burn. In this process the seasonal crop residue was not burned, but charred and turned into the earth. Doing this sequestered most of the carbon in the crop residue, and created an extremely hospitable amendment to the otherwise thin and fragile soil - something that in turn nurtured beneficial microorganisms that broke down the poor native soil and transformed it in to extraordinarily rich humus. Read this from “1491″:

“Landscape” in this case is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists’ claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta—rich, fertile “black earth” that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.

Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn’t leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. Apparently at some threshold level … dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living ’super’-organism than an inert material.

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.”

If rich topsoil was literally engineered by humans on this scale, this is an encouraging possibility to address the today’s challenges of depleted soils and desertification. Organizations have sprung up to study the potential of employing similar techniques today, creating what is now referred to as biochar (or agrichar), such as the International Biochar Initiative. And the notion that Native Americans manipulated and nurtured the ecosystems of the Amazon over 500 years ago also challenges today’s conventional definitions of what is pristine - indeed by taking away one of our most reliable archetypes of living without a footprint - perhaps shakes the whole idea of pristine wilderness to its roots. And needless to say, if carbon sequestration is truly an imperative for our species, creating biochar could hold more potential - and side benefits - than virtually any other scheme.

Anthropocene Age

It is been proposed by a group of British geologists that the Holocene Age is over and that the new era should be named the Anthropocene Age to reflect the clear commencement of human induced geological change. The idea appears compelling although the fact is that human activity has modified the geological record since the onset of the Holocene which began with the Pleistocene nonconformity.

In fact our incredibly stable climate that has permitted the global rise of humanity as an organizing agent is unique to the Holocene and ended the million year northern ice age brought on be the closing of Panama. The key feature of this era has been the stable temperature range that has fluctuated only over a one degree range. Prior to that the global temperature galloped back and forth over a range of several degrees.

I have already explained now this major break came about in my item tittled the 'Pleistocene Nonconformity'.

The fact is that man's role has been paramount throughout the Holocene. The major change that has occurred in the past 200 years is that we have mastered the art of extracting geological carbon and burning it. I expect this to continue until it is all consumed, even if conservation drags the process out for a thousand years.

Since all this carbon has already overloaded the capacity of the biosphere to absorb it, as can be reasonably expected, we are now preparing to remove this carbon back into a sequestration protocol. Otherwise we are returning to the Carboniferous Age, when the globe early on was covered in huge accumulations of plant material.

It is here with the onset of terra preta sequestration in the soils that a true geological break will take place. Soils are like living organisms that live in the air soil contact and will actually migrate with any slow change of the surface. Otherwise all the sediments on earth would contain long sequences of buried carbon bearing soils. This is simply not true. In fact the main source of coal appears to be buried peat bogs were oxygen was quickly cut off. Which tells us that in a normal aerated soil that deeper plant carbon is recycled back to the surface by various mechanisms.

On the other hand terra preta soils will have a pure carbon component that will resist ever been easily broken down. That means that over thousands of years, that accumulating soils will begin to leave behind soils that are carbon rich yet already outside the growing zone. This will be a unique signature that will certainly be apparent in the geological record.

Since I anticipate that atmospheric water harvesting will soon open all temperate climes to plant husbandry of some sort, even if it is a Douglas fir on top of Ayer's rock, this means that a global geological event is really in the offing that will be more dramatic than almost any other major event. We can also expect this process to be sustained for as long as mankind occupies this planet, a time period surely as long and sustained as the reign of the dinosaurs. At the same time, the incipient soils will be built and nurtured with terra preta providing the signature.

Compared to that type of epoch, the ten thousand years of the Holocene is merely a prelude.

It may seem to some that this is all a bit optimistic, yet all the tools for a totally sustainable globe have already been described. Even some of the lesser perceived difficulties on the way to pure sustainability are resolvable.

I particularly point out that terra preta in will very likely allow the total recycling of the nutrient load eliminating dependence on chemical fertilizers. At the very least, it should reduce out consumption by an order of magnitude or two. In fact the fertilizer free exploitation of established terra preta soils for decades say exactly that.

It is easy now to imagine a human future in which mankind has small special purpose urban ares and is mostly living in small agrocomplexes, each in harmony with its square mile of farm and woodland. Such could readily support global populations vastly larger than the present.

Nikolaus Foidl reports of waste wood burns

Nikolaus Foidl has given us an excellent report on the experience gained attempting to exploit the products of an open burn of waste wood. It also brings home my ongoing disquiet surrounding the drawing of conclusions from this and many other similar tests. In this case particularly, a huge amount of ash was produced that was not fully incorporated into the surrounding soils. This made the soil initially very rich in soluble salts which had to be leached away before any benefits could emerge. The soil is actually ‘burned’ by an overload of nutrients.

I suspect that this is a problem with traditional slash and burn protocols also, however it may be obviated.

When we set out to produce a uniform end product of either charcoal or bio char or Terra Preta, it is necessary to manage the variables of temperature, airflow and end product production.

This can be done in an industrial kiln to great satisfaction. Tight packed wood with restricted air flow also seems to work okay. The earthen kiln that I have proposed for corn culture fits in between in terms of its ability to manage the process.

First and most important, the air flow must pass through an earthen wall several inches in thickness in order to reach the hot zone. This strictly limits the amount of oxygen and its velocity.

Second, the combustion is primarily fed by the heat generated from light gases such as methane which ignites first closest to unburnt material producing the most heat directly were it is needed, continuing the reduction process. Heavier unburnt volatiles enter the chimney were they may or may not be consumed if there is any remaining oxygen. These hot gases are then forced back into the stack at the top of the chimney traveling into the corn and back through the soil cap. Two things happen. A lot of the produced heat is absorbed by the unburnt corn stover preparing it for combustion. The gases then enter the soil giving up much of the unburnt volatiles including most pyrolysis fluids. They are also well distributed in the process and depending on the thickness of the soil cap, most are captured.

Once the fuel is totally processed, the capping soil is mixed with the reduced bio char and ash to properly distribute the combustion products throughout the soil. This virgin terra preta soil blend can then be taken in baskets or shovel loads to produce seed hills. Biological agents will quickly destroy any complex organics not already reduced by the heat leaving a carbon enriched soil that can hold nutrients for years as demonstrated in the Amazon. Rather importantly, they must also succeed in quickly reducing the high acid content of the pyrolysis fluid. That will need to be studied in field tests.

What I find particularly beguiling about this earthen kiln protocol is that it allows for quite a bit of variation in the air flow through changing the thickness of the earthen shell itself. This allows for a maximization of output over time. More importantly, this method is completely within the skill set and capital resources of every subsistence farmer in the world. He and his family merely need to be shown once.

From: Nikolaus Foidl <nfoidl@desa.com.bo>

Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:28:52 -0400

To: "terrapreta-request@bioenergylists.org"<terrapreta-request@bioenergylists.org>

Conversation: Charcoal in soil

Subject: Charcoal in soil

Dear All!

Looking on the trials done so far with Charcoal in soil and terra preta, the most common plant used was corn so far. I do trials with charcoal since one year and I have as well soils at hand where huge amounts of forests after clearing where piled up in long rows and burned down, leaving behind ashes, charcoal and torrefied wood and all the condensates from the burning.( as well a good amount of soil burned together with the wood because the soil was on the roots and part of the logs and branches where covered by soil when they pushed the chained down trees to a row with caterpillars.

In the first 2 years only certain grasses ( brachiaria) would grow on those stripes. After some 3 years the planted corn and soy and sunflower show pronounced growth in the beginning but after about 60 to 70 days all plants in the field reach the same height and have the same state of development.

Looking at the harvest data there is no significant difference between charcoal and non charcoal in fertile well fertilized land not suffering drought. If there is drought during the development of the plants then the charcoal plot is more sensible and shows earlier drought damage in the plants.

If you make a mass balance over the amount of forest cut down and dragged with a caterpillar from a stripe of 50 meter each side to a small long heap of about 15meter width then you accumulate some 5 times the volume of the intact forest in the stripe of 15 meter or you concentrate the amount of 5 ha forest in one ha area and burn it . If we suppose a average dry mass yield of total biomass per ha (including roots) of some 200 to 250 tons this would be some 1000 to 1250 tons of dry biomass burning in this ha.

From sampling I can estimate that there are some 150 to 180 tons of partially or fully charred material per ha in the burning zone. So this leaves us with a huge amount of ashes in the same area. As most of the material are trees with an average diameter of 15 to 20 cm ( some are more then 60 cm, but most are smaller brush like trees) we have a good amount of barks with quite a high ash content. Wood without bark is in the range of 0.3 to 0.8 % ash and barks are in average around 7 to 8 % ash, some more.

Do you have any idea what this naturally reduces to in terms of elemental charcoal? Otherwise the amounts appear excellent and suggest that modern land clearing could be judiciously used to sequester a lot of carbon.

We urgently need to make mineral mass balances about the ashes and we need to know as well in which chemical form those ashes are in the soil and to what chemical form they convert. From the first look it seems to me that potassium and calcium and then magnesium and phosphor would be the mayor constituents.( someone has figured out the plant availability of those ashes?)

Now imagine that the indios additional used these burn and char areas as waste disposal and most of there waste where ashes from cooking fire and rests from there meals like fish heads and spines or bones or non edible parts of the animals beefing there diet ( as well needed a mass balance over at least a period of several tens of years to get a grip on quantities and content of minerals) then you easy can imagine that the terra preta sites are an enormous accumulation of minerals in different chemical forms. The adding of biologic material enhances whatever biology is working there and for sure will enhance growth of whatever plant you grow there.

We all believe that this is likely, but I also think that the land needed by a family was at least four or five acres. That means a pretty broad distribution of human and fish waste into the field. Has anyone mapped distribution over several acres to find out if it was consistent. If I were personally handling high grade wastes in such a setting, I would focus on the household garden to get the biggest bang for my effort. Of course a communal village could well have shifted this every several years.

Now the charcoal does not play an important active role in the beginning but degradation over the centuries transforms the charcoal into more stable chemics like humic acid and fulvic acid etc. which have high interchange capacity and high chelating capacity.

Is this a derivative of pure carbon or remnant organics? Does terra preta show such an acid profile? If not why not?

Maize reacts very strongly to high amounts of potassium ( the mayor ingredient of ashes)as well does soy and sunflower. Brachiaria as well is addict to high potassium. Other grasses do have problems with high potassium and do not grow in the first years in those burned areas.( dont think that this is a coincidence)

Conclusion is that we may be get distracted by fast visible effects on corn and other potassium and only relate those effects with charcoal but not with ashes and other micro minerals accumulated in waste disposal sites.

I believe in several enhancing effects of charcoal like vigor enhancing from the liquids produced during charring but I think there is very low direct short time effect from charcoal itself on growth of plants ( first 10 to 50 years). There is without doubt a indirect sink and source effect by its capacity to adsorb micro and macro nutrients.

Ancient terra preta soils are been continuously cropped over decades without significant fertilization. This implies that the carbon essentially fixed nutrients in the growing zone. Otherwise fertility would have collapsed.

Best regards Nikolaus

Terra Preta Commentary,Dave Yarrow,Gerald Van Koeverden,Larry Williams,Duane Pendergast

I posted yesterday’s posting on the terra preta group and got some good feed back that is helpful. Formating presents my response first before the comment and it was a bit too much trouble to get it the other way around.

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I totally agree, but they can be associated with the time of manufacture and can powerfully indicate the principal crops. Their actual presence is actually anomalous for the region in any event, or at least corn is.

What I have been able to extract to date is the pollen evidence for corn and cassava culture. And yes large chunks of wood charcoal should retain cellular information that can support identification. The problem we have with effectively powdered soft plant charcoal is that it may not be that easy and could have been easily overlooked.

I would have screened the material and picked out the nice shiny chunks reasonably assuming this was representative of the fine powder and been totally misled. This is however a question that may be answered by a specialist in this type of identification who is forewarned. Do we have samples to hand and a specialist? Most identification of this type is focused on wood identification.

Actually, my kids have access to the UBC forestry faculty who would be able to do this type of work. They may even be able to char some corn stover in an oven to compare while we are at it.

does someone have good samples of terra preta?.

----- Original Message ----
From: Gerald Van Koeverden <vnkvrdn@yahoo.ca>
To: Robert Klein <arclein@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 2:41:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Early Terra Preta Production

Pollen evidence only tells us what plants grew in the area, not what the charcoal was made from. As you can see by the quote from a study below, scientists have the means of identifying both the age and species of the source origin of charcoal buried in the soil. Its called "soil forensics." Certainly, it must have already been done for terra pretas??

"The charcoal collections were carried out in the main massifs of present-day rainforest between latitudes 15-degrees-30'S and 19-degrees-15'S and longitudes 145-degrees-E and 146-degrees-30'E. All charcoal was collected from locations which precluded the possibility that the charcoal had been transported. Much of the charcoal retained cellular structure, and the taxonomic source was determined using an electron scanning microscope and wood identification keys. All positive identifications belonged to the genus Eucalyptus. Radiocarbon dated samples revealed ages between approximately 27,000 BP and 3500 BP with the majority of samples in the period 13,000-8000 BP."

http://www.citeulike.org/group/342/article/1306925

Gerrit Van Koeverden

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Hi David

That is good information and like yourself, I wonder if forensic analysis will help us. Thanks for mentioning the three sisters. I have a great deal of respect for the achievements of our agricultural forebears and the corn bean pumpkin cycle is one of the great crop innovations ever. The beans are nitrogen fixers and this allows vigorous growth in the corn. Pure genius. Now if the seed hill is made from corn biochar, I almost believe that we can crop anything.

Weed infestation is fought by close spaced weeding, and after repeating the cycle several seasons, we can expect the infestation to be much less. The seeds in the soil are depleted. Also the only soil turning will be caused by the removal of weeds in these original conditions. This will also reduce the exposure of new seeds.

In other words, aggressive weeding practices can work even in the jungle, as long as you are able to get back in almost every day. That also tells us the limiting factor for these early agriculturists in the Amazon. The problem will be much easier in temperate soils.

Thank you for this input. We today forget the labor cost of freshly clearing and initially maintaining a piece of land. It must be a bitter pill for slash and burn farmers to abandon recently cleared rain forest for lack of fertility.

Regards

Bob

----- Original Message ----
From: "dyarrow@nycap.rr.com" <dyarrow@nycap.rr.com>
To: terrapreta@bioenergylists.org
Cc: Robert Klein <arclein@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 7:25:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Early Terra Preta Production

thanks, robert, for keeping this important discussion alive. the
relax assumption is charcoal = wood. but we need a broader
perspective of likely feedstocks for char production.

35 years ago, living in new mexico, i learned the navajo method to
make pottery by firing the ots in a pit filled with dried cow pies --
areadily available and abundant resource in that arid climate. worked
wonderful. it was common knowledge how to close up the pit, and
create a reducing fire that yielded beautiful black pottery. of
course, before the spaniards appeared 500 years go, there were no cows
in the southwest.

cornstalks make excellent feedstock to make biochar -- or just for
cooking in the kitchen. especially tropical strains of corn, which
often grow 12 to 15 feet tall. i grew some guatamalan corn in my
backyard garden in upstate NY a few years ago in a classic three
sisters garden, and was startled how high the stalks grew.
unfortunately, before they tassled, the frost killed them.

however, my own conclusion is indigenous amazonians used more than
crop residues. fertile soil in a tropical climate erupts with an
abundant diversity of green growth. maintaining cropland means steady
efforts to remove weeds, bushes and saplings sprouting from the soil.
i doubt the indigenous growers -- mostly the women -- practiced the
kind of clean cultivation of modern farmers, where the soil is swept
bare except for the designated crop. indigenous weed removal would
have been more selective and thoughtful.

i would guess that the average amazon field produced far more weed
biomass each year than crop residue. and most of this would have been
non-woody weeds that will crumble easily into dust once converted to
char in a pottery kiln. how can forensic soil analysis identify this
non-woody biochar after 300+ years of residence in the soil?

david yarrow

___________________________________

Hi Larry

This will take a bit of trial and error to shake out properly but I can make a couple of comments. The roots can be overlapped a couple of times to get a thicker wall and better internal packing. This has to be played with in the field until we get it right. The main task is to create a thick enough wall of mud that is still porous enough to permit incoming slow airflow. This will vary with the soil type. The top of the stack can be well mudded of course.

It is a combination of slow incoming air and exiting combustion gases reducing the stover that makes this work. I suspect that slower works best as long as it is not so slow as to allow too much heat loss. It would have to be tended by a chap with a shovel to throw dirt who develops the necessary experience. Recall that a properly managed industrial system takes a good 12 hours to do its job, and then you have to wait for it to cool off.

I am skeptical about even alder since the root ball is not compact, or at least I do not think so. i never tried to pull one or if i did I was singularly unsuccessful. Corn on the other hand is a sweetheart to pull. The disc is perhaps nine inches across and the stalk with leaves is a good inch or so. It could not be designed better for a planned packing procedure. The only question is what packing plan will work best. For that we need to go do it.

Unfortunately i no longer have a corn field at my finger tips, so I need access to like minded folks to do field tests.

The main thing about corn is that we can tight pack the stalks themselves, preventing uneven burning and hotspots that would destroy a lot of product.

I am pleased that you are experimenting. There are plenty of problems with wood charcoal, but after all that work is done to make this very special product we have to actually crush it. This means the use of grinding stones to reduce tons of char each and every year to a usable powder. My sense is that this is way too hard and that it never happened that way. Corn and other soft plant residues completely eliminates this problem. And there is enough corn stover per acre to prove the value of the method the very next season.

A group of harvesters made it work the first time and it was then quickly adopted. I suspect that we will discover that this method was far more widespread that realized but used only occasionally in drier climates. It will take soil analysis to find that out but to date no one has really looked, or has misidentified any powdered charcoal seen.

A microscopic test procedure that we could trust would test that hypothesis.

bob

----- Original Message ----
From: Larry Williams <lwilliams@nas.com>
To: Robert Klein <arclein@yahoo.com>
Cc: Miles Tom <terrapreta@bioenergylists.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 3:04:34 PM
Subject: Fwd: [Terrapreta] Early Terra Preta Production... and a Western Red Alder fantasy

Robert-------Thanks for reposting this information. After making
charcoal with Richard Haard, I can say that it takes a lot of work to
build and manage a firing and have wondered how we could afford to
make a mound type firing with very high priced fuel or no fuel. I am
into efficiency. Richard has followed the work of John Flottvik and
has received a fine grade of charcoal as a result. With many thanks
for John's support, free charcoal is not in the cards in the future.

I fully agree that transporting organics to a distant site makes no
sense or should I say "cents". Currently, we plan to do another
firing of wood in a few months for acquiring more charcoal and to see
what we can learn about the products from a firing. It seem that we
should consider doing a field burn in the late fall with corn stalks
to learn of the difficulties of using stover material. I would assume
that freshly dug damp clayey soil is essential in the process that
you describe.

We live under some regulations concerning air quality and this may
mean that the fall timing of a test may be a problem.

Have you made stover charcoal? It would seem that the stacked roots
would need some mudding to better seal the firing chamber. I have
wondered is there is a fire proof blanket that could be used instead
of dirt if we tried a similar technic using small Western Red Alder
trees as you used the roots of the corn plants. As I write this it
comes to mind that I might be able to use a mixture of hay/ straw/
grass and clay to provide sealed surface to contain the firing
chamber. In local areas of high water tables young and old alder
trees have a flat roots mass. I might be able to use a jute mesh or
stuff the spaces between the roots with hay/ straw/ grass and clay to
assist in holding the surface together because the Alder roots are
not close knit. Using alder as the wood source would allow for a year
round firing potential... a fun fantasy. As you may be able to tell I
am writing as I work out the details.

With a stover kiln, how air tight do you think that it was? I have an
idea that it was fairly well sealed?

I much appreciate your thoughts-------Larry

_____________________________________

Hi

The persistence of charcoal is ample evidence that charcoal resists any form of chemical weathering which makes sense but needed to be proved. Terra preta proves it. It is not resistant to mechanical weathering, however,and the type of corn char that we are proposing would start of been very fine. The remaining question is whether any particles large enough to show cell structure would survive. It is very fragile stuff.

The pottery shards may do some magic, but I think that will be a needle in a haystack, as the clay would be worked on the river bank and sun dried there.

regards

bob

----- Original Message ----
From: Gerald Van Koeverden <vnkvrdn@yahoo.ca>
To: Greg and April <gregandapril@earthlink.net>
Cc: Terra Preta <terrapreta@bioenergylists.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 6:36:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Early Terra Preta Production

Nobody would bother hiring a soil forensics scientist who has to depend on finding perfect specimens encased in ceramics or preserved in amber in order to make some deductions...

______________________________________

Hi Duane

Not as nicely as wood, but it should be possible to take it to the high probability level while confirming the use of fast growing annuals.

Bob

----- Original Message ----
From: Duane Pendergast <still.thinking@computare.org>
To: Robert Klein <arclein@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 9, 2008 10:57:43 AM
Subject: RE: [Terrapreta] Early Terra Preta Production

Robert,

I got that the point of the eucalyptus example was simply to point that examination of the charcoal can reveal it’s source, presumably from microscopic structure. I wonder if corn charcoal is similarly identifiable

Duane Pendergast

Subsistence Charcoal

I must say that the terra preta group on bionet.org has continued to steadily increase its traffic. I have recently been bombarded with nearly 40 messages a day and I have over 1000 messages that have gone unread. Most of the action has been around various efforts to pursue aspects of pyrolysis in a modern setting.

I have seen no alternative to the corn culture earthen kiln approach that I have proposed a few months back.

Since then we have seen film on the production of subsistence charcoal in Africa and it is very instructive. Firstly, in the modern world, everyone can get their hands on an axe and a simple saw. This makes it easy to hack everything down and to cut it up. Making this woody waste into charcoal is quite another matter.

It fails to pack well but the charcoalers are still able to create pits and to throw dirt on the burning pile to suppress the flames. This obviously will produce some charcoal, but the yield must be terrible. what is clear though is that the produced wood charcoal is poorly charcoaled at best. We see people carrying bundles of charred sticks and bulky bags of char. It makes great fuel. It is almost impossible to use as a soil additive.

Whatever lingering thoughts that I may have had in support of the charcoaling of wood for soil remediation can be laid to rest. Only a modern industrial grade charcoaler might be able to produce suitable material.

Subsistence farmers could not even begin to make wood waste work for them. They needed a helper crop. That was provided in the form of corn to the Amazon Indians.

I also think that wood charcoal was always too valuable as a fuel as is true today in Africa, to ever be crushed and folded into the seedbed. In fact a man load of charcoal probably weighs a hundred pounds and needs be carried miles back to town. That one hundred pounds needed about one ton of source material to be cut down and stacked and covered with dirt while burning. Maybe they did twice as good in terms of yield. However it worked, that man load of charcoal took two days of labor input at the least.

There is simply no way that such a production model could be used to produce terra preta. And the Indians did not have steel tools.

One thousand year Holocene climate cycle.

When it comes to the debate on Global Warming, I continue to be informed by the extremely clear fact that we are continuing to operate within the incredibly stable range established with the onset of Holocene some 12,000 years ago.

It really does look like a global half degree switching back and forth between the two hemispheres that operates on a thousand year cycle or so. Just think. The last high was around 1000 AD and perhaps also 0 AD and the rise of the Roman Empire in Europe. The little Ice Age hit with a vengeance around 1500 AD and the Western Roman Empire fell around 500 AD when the Rhine froze over. What little we know of the prior millennium suggests that the same cycle showed itself there to. And that half degree is more than sufficient to give us all the currently experienced warming effects in the north.

As has been said, this is actually a cause for celebration. Agricultural productivity in the Northern hemisphere will increase. The Arctic will be clear of ice every summer for at least two months and this should happen even in the next decade. This will naturally create a huge fishery. So shut up already.

And absolutely none of this needs to be linked to the production of excess CO2 on the basis of the record of the past 12,000 years.

That still leaves us with the ongoing problem of the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is for sure a human created problem and must be ameliorated. What we have burned so far has forced a thirty percent gain. What exists in the ground is sufficient to make this a 100 % gain. What is more, it is a reasonable assumption that man will burn all available fossil fuels no matter what else is done and even if it is dragged out over a thousand years. It is simply too efficient as a feedstock to not be used.

As we have shown, the best solution to that problem is carbon sequestration by way of the global production of terra preta soils. It really is that simple. Of course the chatterers will try to obstruct the solution as usual, but they all die out eventually and it will simply become mandatory traditional practice.

As was true in the Amazon for at least a thousand years.

Carbon Credits

The one aspect of the so called global effort to tackle global warming that I find most disturbing is the stumbling initiative to establish a carbon credit market. The concept is very laudable. We can all grasp that a transfer of money from those dumping CO2 into the atmosphere to those taking it out would go a long way to both measure the size of the problem and to also ameliorate it.

What I have yet to see in the press is a credible explanation of the mechanics. And my own efforts were rewarded with a maybe next year response and that was two years ago. What am I missing? I suspect something is clearly wrong and the most likely reason is that the approach to date is simply wrong headed.

It seems too easy for participants to rig a green wash rather than a working solution when there is no particularly clear market mechanism and reporting system.

If we return to the efforts spurred by the Kyoto accord, we immediately discover one primary flaw. It is the lack of equality among the participants. The accord was patched together by a group of folks all trying to protect their short term interests every way they could. It was not an accord so much as an effort to preserve the status quo and assign blame when it fell apart.

The only system that will ever actually work is one that treats everyone equally, with at most a negotiated transition for those facing immediate hurt. The only way that this can be implemented is by assessing a direct transfer credit against every barrel of oil produced and every ton of coal mined globally. It is simple and the producers are then stuck with the very real task of actually spending those credits efficiently.

The present attempt is already a hodge podge of gerrymandering and special interest manipulation which will actually raise the cost of business and create huge imbalances deleterious to the global economy.

The UN can find itself in a management role of enforcing compliance. This will be as simple as cutting off the right to export and transferring the credit obligation to the receiving refinery. The audit process can actually catch it all and the cost of non compliance will actually lose access to a profitable side line for the producers.

In the meantime, it is outrageous that industrial carbon obligations have been outsourced to China and India who have no need to meet these obligations. If the system is not universal, we will be treated to the charade of the worst and dirtiest industries been bounced around the globe every twenty years until they have a final home in Tongo Tongo.

A universal credit system stems the incipient fraud and deceit we are already been exposed to. We already have the word 'greenwash' joining the lexicon.

An universally clear global carbon credit or defacto global carbon currency is a fantastic way to establish a proper global financial system because it is directly tied to the life blood of the global economy and will be forever in some form or the other.

It then makes it easy to monetize the establishment of terra preta soils worldwide since that is the one certain method of sequestering carbon in the long term. The carbon sequestered in the Amazon two thousand years ago is still there and still supporting excellent farming.

Slight changes in tillage, although helpful, actually does little more than perhaps prevent further loss of carbon which is actually not good enough.

Without question, it is necessary to call another global conference and use that conference to impose the carbon credit obligation on the producers and empower the UN to police the system. It will still take time to sort out, but it will sort itself out. Let us do it right this time.

When NAFTA was imposed, the transition was implemented in small steps over ten years. We should do the exact same thing here.

UN promotes Global Warming Propaganda

I suppose I should comment on that story put out under the auspicious of the United Nations over the weekend. It came down very strongly on the side of the climate warming as a human caused natural disaster in the making position. Fair enough as special pleading but a little offensive in that they keep trying to masquerade as an authority delivering a sermon from the mount. They even crank out the obligatory petition of scientists in support of their well polished position.

Come on guys, there is plenty of good and excellent reasons to promote doing the right thing in properly husbanding our resources. I just do not think we have to act like it is a matter of democratic choice playing I have more scientists than you. Real change happens when one man says no and sets out to convince others.

You have watched me champion several credible choices that we can all support, knowing that they will change things for the better. They are not even a swindle, as far too many schemes doomed to failure are.

You only need to review my work of terra preta to know that we have created a mechanism that will sequester all the CO2 ever dumped into the atmosphere, while establishing a best practice agriculture worldwide. We can do this without even been too concerned about energy inputs and water supplies during the early stages.

In the meantime, the UN is pushing its private agenda by promoting the climate warming bandwagon by an ongoing series of press releases. This is ultimately a diminution of their own credibility and is disappointing.

You can also be very sure, that if we came to them and said 'we have solutions that require your support', we would only get obstruction. Is it ever possible for a group of people to shift their position without active leadership somewhere? As always, the sheep like their paychecks and will never rock the boat. And though we have leaders, most are only leaders and lack imagination.

We as readers need to do our part in ending the climate warming debate by telling our own circle of contacts that there are policies that are not costly and will resolve the problems causing damage to our environment. A good start is to introduce them to this blog. We have covered most of the bases here.

On its own though, that is not enough. We have created a world in which change can be brought about through political action. And that means that we must educate reporters and politicians about our creditable options. You have all the copy that you need in these pages. Spread the story to these folks and encourage them to lead the fight to a better world.

And we all have to. The UN is clearly pushing a political agenda through their press release program and actually doing something takes a very distant back seat to acquiring money and resources. Of course, that is merely my opinion, but a plea for support without a clear program for success is all about money and always makes me uncomfortable.

Anyone who has worked his way through my blog knows we have solutions. In fact they are fantastic solutions that can be readily proven out. The idea that half the global population can develop a successful agricultural lifestyle while sequestering carbon was just too much to ask for. The discovery that the Amazonian Indians had actually done so in some of the worst agricultural conditions possible was a very pleasant surprise. My modest contribution was to figure out how they actually did it so that we could replicate it worldwide.

This is the nucleus of a global agricultural revolution that needs to be told. Can you imagine the UN actually getting behind such a program? A real action program?

Starting at the bottom

I started this blog with he simple objective of promoting the use of forest building to sequester carbon. I felt that this was a valid objective for the developed world to accomplish. The fixes were a combination of institutional will and emerging technology permitting the forestration of the dry lands by atmospheric water harvesting. Doable but only with the most modern concepts of economic governance.

Then we stumbled into terra preta and discovered that primitive agriculturists had done the job hundreds of years ago. We established a working protocol that matched the evidence and also gave us a way forward. It worked for subsistence farmers who only had their own backs as capital.

We are still a long way from industrializing this protocol for the benefit of the modern world. Most cannot grip the reality that it will never be economically feasible to haul biomass in sufficient volume to a large industrial scale converter. The primitives solved it by mastering the art of it in the middle of their own fields without a significant increase in human work.

We have to do the same thing today with whatever technical assistance we can invent. We are not there yet.

Throughout the tropics, we have huge tracts of well watered tropical soils that are almost unexploitable as agricultural lands. These same lands have huge populations of land starved subsistence farmers that just need to be shown how. If all we did was to convert the slash and burn crowd over to terra preta corn culture, we will likely sequester a ton of carbon per individual per year while eliminating one of our biggest sources of outright atmospheric pollution. The improved land productivity will release much of the lands back into tropical forests, sequestering their share of natural carbon. And once the agricultural land has been treated several times, the need for additional terra preta production will decline.

We can start to solve the global problem of surplus CO2 by helping the worst off farmers establish a better living for themselves and really needing no more than a little instruction an perhaps some seed. Everyone else will catch up as their technical needs are addressed. But it is clear that we must start with the unluckiest.

Biochar Packing Strategies

In my last post, we arrived at the conclusion that the one key crop that can make biochar production feasible for agriculture is corn. It is also apparent that a naturally built stack without much work will produce some biochar, certainly enough for the owner to recognize the value of the product and to want to improve his efficiency.

The first need is to develop an earthen kiln strategy that can hugely increase production. shoveling dirt is an option, but likely very unsatisfactory, difficult to control during the burn, and very labor intensive. Digging a pit can perhaps help improve this situation and may have been a viable option. however, the average pit needs to contain ten tons of material and a typical five acre field will need several pits. This requires an incredible amount of additional labor to execute properly. So although suitable for pottery making, It is a much less practical approach with field operations. And we still have to pay attention to packing.

This is were my understanding of the nature of the corn root ball led me to the conclusion that much more sophisticated packing strategies were available to the farmer that hugely lowered the labor needed to move dirt. The corn root ball consists of a poorly rooted flat disc sitting on the top of the soil. Penetration is less than three inches, while the disc itself is several inches across. It is easily lifted in most soils by the simple expedient of grabbing the stalk and pulling.

We suddenly have a packable source of biochar with its own contribution to the earthen wall attached. What was the farmer waiting for? The remaining question is how best to pack the stalks and to simultaneously build the outer wall of the earthen kiln. So far I have imagined several packing strategies that could work, although they all have to be tested.

But I think that we can all agree that a stalk of biomass with a brick attached is a great start. As good as a box of Leggo.

I see two strategies. One in which a windrow is build with one side forming an earthen wall. Remember that in order to achieve tight packing it will be necessary to overlap the root balls at least three deep creating a mud wall several inches thick. They may also have packed other material among the stalks to improve packing. I think that Cassava is particularly suitable.

A second windrow can then be build against the first windrow on the non walled side. This then still leaves you with the task of covering the exposed stalks with dirt but primarily unto a flat surface. Any type of variation of this packing approach should work very well.

The second strategy is to lay out a 12X12 square and lay in packed layers at right angels to each other with the earthen wall on the outside. We end up with a well packed interior and an outside earthen wall perhaps several feet high completely surrounding the material.. A thin layer of dirt on the top of this stack will then close the kiln.

This is obviously the most attractive approach provided the packing ratio can be maintained.

In all cases, the burn is initiated by carrying an earthenware platter (unfired) full of glowing coals unto the top of the heap, dumping them unto the stalks and then tipping the platter on top of the coals as a shield, and then covering it all with dirt. A crew then watches the heap for breakouts, in order to throw extra dirt as needed.

Observe that we have minimized the labor input throughout. A lot of extra time will be spent of getting the packing right, but that is not onerous. Building a layer of dirt onto the top of the 12X12 heap will move perhaps a ton of dirt which will mix nicely with the ton or two of produced biochar. This is not unreasonable. The produced biochar and dirt mixture can be then carried in baskets back to field to renew the seed hills in time for the next crop.

The point that I would like to make here is that this protocol allowed the ancient farmer to have his terra preta soil immediately and made corn culture possible in tropical soils as proven by pollen analysis. There was no multi season delay in establishing terra preta.

And rather obviously, the same approach today can revolutionize indigenous agriculture globally. And rather obviously also, there is no particular need to do most field once it has been done at least once. The carbon continues to hold nutrients for a very long time.

From the perspective of sequestering carbon, we want this done twenty to fifty times. From the perspective of building a viable soil base, several times should be more than ample.

You realize folks, that this is a total and unexpected revolution in agriculture that can increase agricultural production globally by even an order of magnitude.

All depleted soils can be put back on line everywhere, and the unusable tropical soils can achieve year round high volume production.

And we were only trying to sequester CO2

Linking corn culture and pine beetles

As readers know, I have never been comfortable about the proposed link between global warming and excessive CO2 emissions. Both are measurable facts and their existence is indisputable. But as a thinker who loves rigor, I find it unnecessary to link them to explain the present climatic environment. I also sense a very real danger that the linkage will lead to a global policy misstep when global industrial economy needs very specific issues to be aggressively addressed. Of course, if we can get the right thing done for the wrong reasons, who am I to complain. I am more worried about the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

In our earlier posts, we have extensively developed the thesis that the adoption of terra preta corn culture globally will not only sequester all the excess carbon but also manufacture high quality soil in a previously unanticipated span of time. We can expect a ton of carbon per acre per year of uptake which is at least ten to a hundred times the rate of any alternative. Farmers have never had this option, and it is actually a revolution.

Even if we do nothing else particularly clever, that alone will bail our sorry asses out without anyone else lifting a finger. After all, manufacturing high quality soil will have an immediate and direct effect on farm income.

And yes girls, the climate is now apparently at its warmest since just before the Little Ice Age and since the Bronze age. That is the problem. We know for sure that this is not an unique anomalous event and does not have to be linked to anything.

In my province, the advent of a warmer climate has triggered a mass die off of the interior pine forest as the mountain pine beetle population takes off. It will all run out in about ten years and fall back to normal as new trees fill the niche. In the meantime, we are harvesting as much as possible. And if we are really clever, we will burn off what we cannot harvest to stimulate good new growth without a lot of fire wood lying around.

More importantly it is even much warmer in the high latitudes. I saw last night a report on a chap who has been measuring the temperature regime on the Greenland icecap. In a period of perhaps thirty years , he has found an increase of around five degrees Celsius. I do not want to comment on what that will actually mean and what is happening on the entirety of the icecap. It is far too easy to be on the edge were things are going quite fast, while inland at higher elevations very little is changing.

The true question to ask is, what is happening at the location of the ice cores. Likely nothing, since these areas were chosen for their accumulation ability.

Certainly we can expect the southern edges of the icecap to retreat exposing more land. I think though that that will be essentially it. It also will take hundreds of years to properly stabilize if our current temperature regime is maintained.

And I still keep wondering what triggers a major injection of cold water into the South Atlantic.

Methane and pottery

In the end concerns over methane production are irrelevant. We have doubled production in the last century and it is all gone. The reason is ultimately very simple. It migrates to the upper atmosphere and is consumed. This is something that is not an option for CO2.

Does the sharp increase in methane reaching the troposphere have any effect whatsoever? The quick answer is nothing that is obvious. It is a little like measuring the effect of the Mississippi on the Atlantic. The practical answer as always is to make as much as you desire and see were it takes you. My guess is nowhere.

That means that methane production concerns regarding all forms of biowaste combustion are misplaced. My real concern would be for well intentioned government regulation been actively imposed forcing a larger industrial price for the use of the method.

The second issue that has attracted comment is the association of pottery shards in the terra preta soils. I naturally postulated that this was partly to do with the disposal of kitchen waste in the corn stover stack kilns as we described in earlier postings in July. I also realized that a large bowl would have to be used to transport hot coals to the top of the stack and perhaps dumped into a prepared chimney.

These bowls are as primitive as you can get and very prone to heat breakage, so the presence of pottery is no surprise. My discomfort came from the fact that they would have normally taken broken pottery away with them for disposal elsewhere. So why not?

The answer came to me this morning. It is natural to take the bowl of coals to the top of the stack and to dump them there in the center and to let the coals slowly burn out a chimney. The problem is that you have to cover these coals with dirt to prevent flame out. The best way to do that is to upend the bowl on top of the coals and to throw dirt on top of that. Otherwise, the coals will end up been smothered by the dirt. The bowl would then migrate slowly to the bottom of the stack. In the process the high heat would cause this low quality pottery to breakup into very small pieces not worth recovering or causing any difficulty for cultivation.

Actually a pretty nifty solution to the problem of controlling the ignition coal mass. While this was progressing, the farmer would stand by to throw dirt on any emerging openings in the stack to prevent a flare up.

Getting the job done - Biochar on the modern farm

Getting the job done on the modern farm is a challenge that needs to be confronted on a capital sensitive basis. A good analysis of the problems facing us comes from Tom Miles over at the Terra Preta website in links. I have also posted one of his posts today and the reader can get a taste of the current debate by visiting the Terra preta link.

The rest of the world still relying on traditional agriculture can readily use the corn culture biochar stack that we believe created the Terra preta soils in the first place and have described earlier. This requires no capital investment whatsoever and likely achieves satisfactory results. It would be ironic if it turns out to be the best system which it reasonably could.

For the modern farm, I have proposed the application of a modified incinerator to produce Biochar. My first description came in my June post:

http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/06/pushing-envelope-on-incineration.html

And you may wish to review that. What is becoming painfully clear, is that the secondary chamber will have to be fabricated inexpensively, eliminating its secondary usefulness as a incinerator and likely eliminating alternative recovery concepts. The machine needs to be basic and cheap because it cannot be operated year round to produce a premium byproduct.

Let us return to the concept of the modified shipping container. The original intent for this design concept was to deliver low impact incineration to a small municipality. This is achieved by the use of a two step burn. The first burn inside of the fire brick lined shipping container is held to just under 600 degrees by controlling the oxygen supply.

The flue gas, containing volatiles and other nasties (municipal waste, remember) is then vented into a separate much smaller chamber. Fresh air is injected, immediately jumping the temperature to 2000 degrees. This technique bypasses the production of intermediary combustion products that will be an emission problem. The high temperature flue gas can then be sent back into the first chamber as needed to increase the heat of its contents.

The system was extremely successful in largely eliminating emission problems surrounding the hospital waste that had driven the original development of this system.

This same system, built around a steel shipping container and perhaps a little simplification, can be used to produce a range of low temperature carbon based products ranging from biochar to possibly fully activated charcoal. The sizing is also right for agricultural use and the implied capital cost should come in at under $50,000 with any level of volume production. I anticipate that a manufacturer will simply supply the second chamber and the control system, while the buyer will acquire and line a shipping container. This will reduce costs even further and avoid shipping damage with the firebricks. A warning though, the second chamber, though comparatively small, must withstand very high temperatures and other stresses. The high performance and engineered municipal model of the secondary high temperature burner was costing out at a lot over $100,000 since it was cylindrical in shape and the bricks were over twice as thick and specially fabricated.

This system can be readily varied under operation in order to achieve the best possible yield of product including the option of not burning anything in the main chamber at all.

A typical charge of biomass will likely be less than ten tons for anything except wood for a twenty foot container. Something like straw could even be blown in.

As we have posted earlier, the one crop that can produce the most biomass per acre is corn. Corn will make ten plus tons of stover, while any grain crop will make at best one plus tons per acre. There is an order of magnitude difference. That also rather obviously implies an order of magnitude difference in haulage costs.

A farm producing enough corn stover to operate the carbonizer for say 40 days is not likely to have produced other types of waste that would need more than several days of additional operation. This means that the facility will be operated in the fall for a little over a month just after harvest. The produced carbon can be readily stored in preparation for been rebroadcast in combination with fertilizer onto the field originally cropped.

Our output is at least a ton of carbon for each acre of corn grown. We can then anticipate that the farm will be able to add a ton of carbon each year to every acre used for corn production. The increased fertility and the improved soil quality will also lead to an increase in corn production accelerating the process.

This new system now calls for a multi year field test aimed at defining costs and operating parameters and should be done soonest under an agricultural extension program. The visible payoff should come in the form of both sharply increased yields and a reduction in chemical inputs. In other words, the economic model is no different than the old traditional manure cycle of a mixed farm. It promises to just be a much better way.

It is clear that we will only achieve capital efficiency if we make the system a biochar only solution and integrate its use into farm operations in a way similar to the manure spreader. We may end up using the manure spreader to distribute the biochar unto the field. That would even clean the damn thing.