[Terrapreta] Request for help for new Nottingham Bio-char Group

[Richard Haard]

Hello Brian

Seeking guidance on setting up biochar and planning  well in advance  
is a wise practice. My own experiments are proceeding in PNW - USA are  
interesting and once set up are not taking me a excessive amount of  
time. My own work is a block study that is similar to Christoph  
Steiner in Manaus.

Charcoal sources - we felt that since Steiner found his charcoal with  
local suppliers we could make our own too. We also were fortunate to  
have a pilot project pyrolyser nearby as received a donation of  
charcoal powder that met the low temperature specification. Otherwise  
I would go with local sources and not worry.
An overriding concern about homemade charcoal in urban areas is the  
smoke. However the smoke and heat play a role in formation of  
terrapreta in soil as Steiner spelled out clearly in his dissertation..

Expectations - Spend some time in the literature and make comparisons  
to the soil conditions in Amazonia to your own. Do you currently have  
issues in your soil with  maintaining organic matter content, CEC,  
calcium and potassium availability, phosphorus binding, leaching of  
nitrates? If you add charcoal to your best soils you may have a muted  
response. This is our situation and my way to work around this  
situation is to continuously crop with no further organic matter or  
fertilizer additives. We are now on second crop moving into second  
year of 3 or 4. An alternative for you would be to use depleted soil  
to start to study the effects of charcoal in combination with compost  
and or manure.

Measurements - setting up an experiment is the easy part. I did not  
have time to conduct a detailed to closely monitor physical features.  
Having access to interns or students would be handy to work on this  
and reduce the data. Without close chemical analysis is like flying  
blind. My 28 study blocks are analysed twice a season late spring,  
after soil is warm and in fall after harvest is completed. 56 tests  
per year are well worth the expense is my advice.

Your study group - My advice is to encourage diversity of thinking  
rather than consensus . Here in Bellingham our group is two of us,  
Larry and I. We help each other but also allow ourselves the freedom  
to follow ideas of our own. Larry has been on a very interesting  
approach of biological enrichment of charcoal by pretreatment before  
use.

My advice is rather than rush to set up all of your experiments with  
start of growing season take some time for at least part of your  
acquired charcoal to precondition the char until it has been colonized  
by fungi and bacteria in a compost made of  - burned soil, wood chips,  
urine and food waste with charcoal. If you leave some pieces large  
enough to monitor then you will know when it is ready.

Keep in mind that engineers who are designing, making and advocating  
use of these pyrolysers also these kinds of people build sewage plants  
and fish hatcheries from steel and cement; making structures for  
function better accomplished by nature. Whether we depend on these  
machines for charcoal or not our contribution as gardeners to the  
knowledge of function and best use of charcoal may be in the  
biological realm.

Best Wishes

On Feb 24, 2008, at 1:59 AM, Brian davey wrote:

> There is a group in Nottingham(shire) that has become interested in  
> bio-char
> and could do with some  advice and support from the scientists so  
> that we do
> not re-invent the wheel, do what others have already tried. Our aim  
> in the
> coming year is to do some small scale plot and pot trials  with bio- 
> char so
> see for ourselves what the effect on plant growth is. The sowing  
> seasons is
> rapidly approaching but so far our attempts to make contact with  
> academics
> who could give up the cutting edge advice haven't come to much. So  
> this is an
> appeal for help and assistance via the terra preta e mail list -  
> either e
> mail advice or, better still, someone who lives near enough, to get  
> involved.
>
> To say a bit more about our group. We are a number of individuals  
> from a
> variety of backgrounds - particularly gardening. We have also made  
> contact
> with a traditional charcoal maker and the Notts Wildlife Trust, has  
> expressed
> an interest in the issue and they make charcoal in a traditional way  
> too. We
> have also contacts with the Henry Doubleday Research Association who  
> have
> expressed an initial interest and, if they could find funding might  
> be able
> to do research, including with their network of members and  
> supporters.
> Further to that we have an interested contact  with a worker for the
> Federation of Community Gardens and City Farms. Several of us have  
> been
> associated with a project called Ecoworks - which has 20 allotments  
> gardens
> in St Anns in Nottingham and runs organic horticultural training and  
> supplies
> restaurants and a box scheme. Ecoworks has just got a contract to  
> cut hedges
> on the allotments and it had occurred to us that the cuttings could be
> charred. Several of us are also in Transition Nottingham and are  
> linked with
> Transition Bristol where there are gardeners interested in bio-char.
>
> So we are well connected and have potential - what we do not have,  
> is detailed
> scientific advice on how to proceed. We would like to do small scale  
> pot
> trials and also we have identified a small area on the Ecoworks  
> FRESH garden
> for trials. However our latest readings suggest that it may be more
> complicated than crushing up charcoal and putting it in the soil and  
> sowing
> seeds in the mixture. The literature and people we know associated  
> with Danny
> Day are saying we need to use low temperature char. Then there are  
> issues too
> - like what kind of biomass to use to make the char.
>
> In the terra preta listing I saw the reference to the Scientific  
> American
> article from May of last year which says:
>
> "In addition, scientists are finding it hard to replicate the  
> original terra
> preta soils. "The secret of the terra preta is not only applying  
> charcoal and
> chicken manure—there must be something else," says Bruno Glaser, a  
> soil
> scientist at Bayreuth University in Germany. Field trials in  
> Amazonia using
> charcoal with compost or chicken manure find that crop yields  
> decline after
> the third or fourth harvest. "If you use terra preta you have  
> sustaining
> yields more or less constantly year after year," he says.
>
> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=5670236C-E7F2-99DF-3E2163B9FB144E40&page=2
>
> So its obviously more complicated and we need advice - like how much  
> char
> should be use? From what biomass? What plants are best used as a  
> trial - in
> the plot we have in mind using brassicas would be the next plants in  
> the
> rotation....What should we mix the bio-char with? How do we get low
> temperature bio-char? Is it worthwhile doing initial experiments  
> using char
> made in traditional ways or must it be in higher tech pyrolisis  
> equipment? If
> it needs to be then how do we procede?
>
> As I have said - if we can construct some experiments then they  
> might be taken
> up by other organisations like Henry Doubleday and the Federation of  
> City
> Farms and Urban Gardens - we might get some funding to do this and  
> we might
> be able to spread this to many amateur, community and small scale
> horticultural gardeners but can someone point us in the right  
> direction on
> the practicalities please.
>
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