[Terrapreta] eprida char - organic?

[Peter Read]

I think your main message is that adding good practice biochar to good practice organics will not do as much good as adding it to bad practice 'field hydroponics'. Sounds suspiciously like Economics 101 principle of diminishing returns.

A propos " We can't even say it turned out well for the folks who used TP originally. They apparently are not around any more" , my understanding from that fascinating BBC Panorama programme 'El Dorado' is that the populous pre-Cloumbian civilizations of the Amazon basin were gifted with smallpox and measles by the first European explorers, so that there was virtually nobody left when they came back 50 years later. Not due to biochar. There's a marvellous Randy Newman song  with the refrain

"Hide your wives and daughters
Hide your groceries too
Th'great nations of Europe's comin thru"

Regarding how to get biochar, if it's in short supply where you are, my friend and sustainability campaigner here in New Zealand, Molly Melhuish writes

 Micro-scale biochar.  On my own behalf, I am extremely keen to find 
systems where homeowners can "harvest" charcoal from their standard wood 
burners.  We ourselves did so last winter, in our Pyroclassic.  Not 
having a metal bucket, we crammed straight twigs into a ~1 litre tin 
can, covered with another cut-down cann- these produced nice warm flame 
for around 10 minutes and produced enough charcoal from a few batches to 
fill a plastic shopping bag, which we've dug into a very small vege 
garden plot.  (We also dug in large amounts of wandering-jew-compost, so 
we can't say which has made the difference, almost certainly the 
latter).  We've got 2-3 times the vege crops this year that we used to get

Pyroclassic is a local design wood burning stove with a long tube like combustion chamber made of 2 inch thick ceramic that acts like a storage heater and starts up from a few hot cinders if you feed it with dry wood in the morning.  Google it if you are interested.  Wandering jew is the popular name locally for Tradescantia an extremely unpopular and persistent weed.

Cheers

Peter
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jim Joyner 
  To: 'Terra Preta' 
  Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 2:27 PM
  Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] eprida char - organic?


  All this talk about the benefit to organic growers is good rhetoric but not terribly important to most of the  growers.

  Inputs to organic growing are not that difficult. Sustainable organic growers do not target defiencies in the soil, they just build soil. Rock or colloidal Phosphate (for P, C and trace elements), greensand (for potassium and trace elements) and rotations with legumes (for nitrogen) is about all one needs in a biologically active soil. And none of these are particularly critical, none are likely to harm even if the amounts are not exact. Can't say that about acidulated fertilizers or manufactured nitrogen. And, typically, it's not the elements themselves that are harmful, it is that they are immediately available, too available.

  Even the use of Terra preta should not be viewed as some over looked natural phenomena. It, like all farming, is an attempt to manipulate the environment. All we can say is that some manipulations turn out well and some don't. We can't even say it turned out well for the folks who used TP originally. They apparently are not around any more; certainly didn't last as long as the soil they created..

  Even compost is overrated in terms of economy (unless one can't get these afore mentions amendments and there is nothing else). Compost is not harmful by any means but it may not have the inputs that are needed. It is not magical and is also unnecessary and uneconomical for most organic farmers or gardeners. Ultimately, many of the practices in organic farming survive only because it enjoys an artificially monopoly market created inadvertently by the USDA. I seriously doubt that organically grown, as it is practiced today overall, is sustainable.

  Basically, you can't out-nature nature. But that is exactly what conventional farming attempts. There is no unnatural N, P or K. Elements are elements. There are just the over treatment of them by making the them too available .

  The first chemical fertilizers applied after WWII, as a result of a declining explosives industry, were meant to be applied with animal manures (there was still a surfeit of them then.) by basically sheet composting. They still knew we needed carbon in the soil. That has been forgotten and what we have in conventional farming today is field hydroponics. Little about it is biological.

  Having said all that, the folks who really need charcoal are the conventional farmers. A very large part of what a conventional farmer buys in fertilizer literally evaporates. Plus, acidulated fertilizers create imbalances that end up weakening plants, which ends up attracting insects (keep in mind insects, even the ones we call call pests are just doing the job that they have been designed for by God or evolution to accomplish), which means the farmers has to buy pesticides, which further weakens the biological activity in the soil. And so it goes. And then there is run off, water quality issues . . . 

  Charcoal, I think, can go a long ways toward making the conventional farmers life easier and more profitable, not to mention that they will give us a cleaner environment.

  While, I suspect almost any soil can benefit from charcoal, for organic growers, only a few of us who have special case poor soils need it (like amazon farmers or farmers like me with light silty, sandy soils).

  Best regards

  Jim




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