[Terrapreta] Terra Preta Trials 2007

[Richard Haard]

On Mar 24, 2007, at 10:48 AM, Tom Miles wrote:

> We learn by doing. We learn by example. And we learn from each  
> other. As far as I know..........


And thank you Tom for the opportunity to interact with one another  
and to spend time reading the collection of fine articles and posts  
you are maintaining.

Larry and I are preparing to burn about 1 1/2 cords of dry alder,  
other hardwoods and some less seasoned alder and cherry wood into  
charcoal. He is taking the lead on this and we will be using our farm  
tractor to make a place in a fallow field next Saturday morning  
barring a deluge of rain like we are having now. We're going to  
attempt to keep combustion temperatures low by quenching the coals at  
intervals and smothering the fire with wet  hay and sprouting willow  
shoots. This is my first attempt at such a mission but Larry has done  
this before and has a plan in mind.

I suppose with a burn of such a size there is no way to monitor the  
combustion temperature but it will be the proximate analysis that  
will follow that will be the indicator of how we did.  Anyway, we  
have invited some our local friends, interested in the topic of  
charcoal in agriculture to drop by the farm and watch two grown men  
burn a perfectly good pile of firewood. Hopefully we will wind up  
with enough charcoal for a treatment set in our  container  
experiments and another batch to store for a year in the forest under- 
story to test next year as aged charcoal.

There is another element of our interest and work in charcoal in  
agriculture, for Larry and I anyway, it is fun. I call it  
recreational science. Many years ago, Larry and I were conducting our  
own separate researches on riparian restoration with native trees and  
shrubs. I had developed an 'agricultural' approach to the topic and  
Larry's solution was to use a lot of wood chips and create in his  
words a structure for natural system establishment. This was in the  
early days of our local restoration movement when we were all  
learning to do this task. He and i would have a great time setting up  
community discussions where each of us  would take our own viewpoint  
and debate our approaches in order to get everyone  to think about  
how they are doing their own projects.

We were having almost too much fun doing these debates but I  
eventually came to the point of realizing that Larry may indeed have  
the best approach.  So I set up a meeting at the PUD office to  
discuss a Washington Department of Transportation mitigation project  
that was 2 years old and involved a heavy layer of wood chip mulch  
before planting. We had the DOT architect there and would walk over  
to the project after the meeting. I remember Larry at that meeting ,  
eyes got large and he said ' You mean I'm vindicated' ?

With our charcoal work I feel we are at the beginning again and ours  
is a screening test of a number of kinds of charcoal against  
combinations with other additives,  and alone with commercial  
fertilizer,  commercial compost, whatever ? , in a depleted farm soil  
that has just finished an 2 year intensive cropping rotation. We  
might just learn something from this.

Best to all

Rich Haard, Bellingham, Washington


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