[Terrapreta] John Cowan's comments

[Sean K. Barry]

Hi A.D.

Why can't it be that a well fed (by sugars in organic material) soil microbe population will make more ions of plant nutrients (elements N, P, K, Ca, Mg, Fe, etc.) available for uptake by plants (through their roots)?  What makes you think that Silicon or any of the other elements found in soil minerals and as mere trace elements in plants are what microbes are decomposing off of mineral rocks and making available to plants?
Plants which show increased biomass yield have far greater increases in the numbers of atoms of the plants nutrients (N, P, K, Ca, Mg, Fe), and molecules of CO2 and H2O, than they have in increases of trace elements.  Do you not think so?

SKB
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: adkarve<mailto:adkarve at pn2.vsnl.net.in> 
  To: Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org<mailto:Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org> 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 7:41 PM
  Subject: [Terrapreta] John Cowan's comments


  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.
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