[Terrapreta] Subsistence Charcoal

[Michael Bailes]

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 must of missed those. I will go back and look. Are you talking about this
group?
I have seen no alternative to the corn culture earthen kiln approach that I
have proposed a few months back.
I have missed that. Where is it?
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.
Did you watch the BBC documentary which enthused so many about TP?
It is called The Secrets of El Dorado and is avialbale on line from the BBC
for free.
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.
It is really the marriage of pyrolysis technology with ancient Indian
gardening/farming practices that make TP viable as away of reducing Global
warming. Char can still be used as a soil amendment-no matter how it is
produced
Personally I am concerned that many are rusing out to start backyard
charcoal fires. Smoke is not good for very many things.

The African way of making char is one of many.
Look at the traditional charcoal makers of GB. they have been doing this in
the same forests for thousands of years. It is called 'coppicing'
(There will be a link on the original hypography TP thread .)
A lot of charcoal is used in the UK by gardeners and many others. It has a
multitude of applications and uses.
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.
No not really it is just that pyolosis is much less poluting and can produce
massive amounts of char and also saves the energy usually lost in the
traditional charcoal making process
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.
Well they did, make it work for them, amazingly as it may seem. It would
have been alabor intensive process. especially as the charcaol seemed to be
ground into very small pieces (Perhaps with the same implements used to turn
grain into powder/flower?)
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.
I agree. I would think many, if not most, areas of Africa would have
to use charcoal
as a fuel.
In many places there seems to be little forest left even for sticks for
cooking fires.
That is the impression I get.
An African on the list might like to help me out here-are my impressions
correct?
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.
I can't follow you logic here. Couldn't the char be made in situ or
thereabouts?
 I have not seen the film you seem to be referring to.
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.
 Posted by arclein at 12:22
PM<http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/12/subsistence-charcoal.html>

<http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=1752027331714385066&postID=658361222936949035>
Well no, the charcoal used by Amazonian Indians was mostly derived from
hardwood trees. See Amazonian Dark Earths by Lehman et al.
The Amazonians did produce Terra preta, 2-3M deep in some places.
They managed to feed millions of people in a place where 20C expert
agriculturalists said such a thing was impossible.

Now there are hundreds of scientists, and PhD students, trying to work out
how the hell they did do it. We still have a lot to learn.

Personally I will be especially happy when they work out how TP soils
"grow". Something, that at first, seems intuitively impossible (along with
the dozen other things you need to believe about TP before breakfast :))

You seem to be working with a set of assumptions which I find hard to
follow. They are not assumptions used by people who study TP. Perhaps I
needed to see the film which I can't do on dial up Internet service.
I am sorry if I offended you in any way.

-- 
Michael the Archangel 12.15 am15/12/07 and going to find a meteor shower.

"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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /attachments/20071215/b3360c7f/attachment.html