[Terrapreta] Google Alert - terra preta

[Michael Bailes]

I am resisting an intense urge to reply to this.
The list might like to let fly ?!

 *terra preta*

 Subsistence Charcoal<http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/12/subsistence-charcoal.html>
 By arclein(arclein)
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. *...*
 Global Warming - http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/
<http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/>

------------------------------
Tuesday, December 11, 2007  Subsistence
Charcoal<http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/12/subsistence-charcoal.html>
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<http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/12/subsistence-charcoal.html#>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.

FROM:

http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/12/subsistence-charcoal.html

-- 
Michael the Archangel

"You can fix all the world's problems in a garden. . . .
Most people don't know that"
FROM
http://www.blog.thesietch.org/wp-content/permaculture.swf
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