[Terrapreta] Pottery Shards and Terra Preta

[Gerald Van Koeverden]

There already are solid aspects of any soil medium to which bacteria  
can adhere to.   I lean more towards the "protection-from-predator"  
theory.  Go to the link below and watch 16 short movies describing  
various soil organisms:

http://www.agron.iastate.edu/~loynachan/mov/

Gerit

On 11-Dec-07, at 6:54 AM, MMBTUPR at aol.com wrote:

>           from          Lewis L Smith
>
> This thread, especially the pictures of fungi and microbes on and  
> within charcoal, which Tom unearthed a while back,  reminds me of a  
> development which took place here in Puerto Rico some time ago and  
> which may be relevant for the understanding of how terra preta works.
>
> Many years ago, our largest rum distillery, that of the Bacardí  
> Corporation in Cataño, used to dump its distillery slops into the  
> Atlantic Ocean through a long outfall. At some point, the US  
> Environmental Protection Agency staid "stop". So with the aid of a  
> university from the state of Florida, Bacardí scientists developed  
> an anaerobic digester to convert the slops into a biogas and other  
> useful products. This digester eventually  came to supply the heat  
> necessary to produce all of the low-pressure process steam used by  
> the distillery.
>
> Now anaerobic digestion is typically a process in which three  
> different kinds of microbes inhabiting a slurry, in succession  
> "snip" big molecules into small ones. At some point, the chief  
> scientist [ whose name escapes me at the moment ] figured out that  
> the microbes would do a better job if they had more surface on  
> which to "sit" while they "snipped". So he and his associates  
> devised a honeycomb type structure and inserted it in the digester.  
> Digester productivity improved substantially.
>
> Although the chief scientist has retired, the improved process  
> continues in use today. In fact, use of the related patents is  
> available under license. And I believe that one may even still  
> visit the digester control room, as I did years ago.
>
> The point of interest here is the concept that microbes do their  
> work better when attached to surfaces than when they are floating  
> around in a liquid or semi-liquid. This may help to explain the  
> increase in soil productivity obtained by creating terra preta and  
> perhaps even the use of shards, which of course adds to the surface  
> area available to microbes within the terra preta.
>
> What does the List think ?
>
> Cordially. ###
>
>
>
>
> **************************************
> See AOL's top rated recipes (http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes? 
> NCID=aoltop00030000000004)
> _______________________________________________
> Terrapreta mailing list
> Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
> http://bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/ 
> terrapreta_bioenergylists.org
> http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org
> http://info.bioenergylists.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /attachments/20071211/2969dc2e/attachment.html