[Terrapreta] John Cowan's comments

[rukurt at westnet.com.au]

adkarve wrote:
> Dear John,
> I am a hundred percent with you. Charcoal is a valuable fuel. A small quantity of charcoal added to the soil as an amendment would be acceptable, but making charcoal and burying it in the soil just as a means of carbon sequestration would not be acceptable. Growing forests is a better way of carbon sequestration. Charcoal is highly porous. It is my hunch that it not only offers extra surface for microbes to settle on, but also a place where they can survive in the dry season. I have also aired my view, that the microbes degraded soil minerals because they needed the mineral ions for their own metabolism. Plants learned the trick of feeding the microbes with organic matter, so that their numbers increased and they thus made more nutrients available to the plants. 
> Yours
> Dr.A.D.Karve, President,
> Appropriate Rural Technology Institute,
> Pune, India.
>
>   
Hi Dr Karve,

In India of course, charcoal is a valuable fuel, you have so few fuels 
in most of your country. At this time however, charcoal gets used here 
in Australia, and elsewhere in the "west" as barbecue fuel and for some 
industrial purposes. This situation may well change, in the future. Our 
sources of energy may well become too dear and we may all turn to 
simpler fuels, and having by then denuded the landscape, may also find 
it a valuable fuel.
But!! Here in Oz, I have seen paddocks of trees bulldozed into heaps and 
burnt, just to get rid of them. It was a standard farming practice and 
in many places still is. Cane farmers commonly burn their cane, or, if 
they cut green they burn the trash. This is done mainly for disease 
prevention purposes. They would do well to use your daughters charcoal 
maker and turn the resultant carbon into the soil. Carbon sequestration 
by soil incorporation is, at this point, in this country, really only an 
appetiser. The real need is to get some in the soil. That's provided it 
works on our soils of course.

regards,

Kurt