[Terrapreta] Krasil'nikov, Soil & Health Agriculture Library

[F. Marc de Piolenc]

At 07:10 PM 6/16/2008 +0200, Laurens Rademakers wrote:
>Lorenzo here from the Terra Preta mailing list. Thank you for your 
>contribution and welcome to the list.
>Your point about a lack of scientific research and too much advocacy 
>on the list, is valid. But don't you think that in order to receive 
>funding for research, you need to advocate the concept first and get 
>it out there?

If you can show THAT it works, and say (at least approximately) HOW 
it works, advocacy isn't needed. People tend to grab things that are 
helpful to them. These days, everybody has the One True Cure-all That 
Will Save the World from <fill in your favorite threat, actual or 
contrived>, and a Web site complete with virtual fireworks displays 
to promote it. When I read about yet another of these panaceas, I 
skip ahead to find out the how and how much; if it's not there, I 
close the window and move on. What convinced me that t.p. was worth 
looking into was a quick look at Krasil'nikov, that clearly showed 
the benefit of charcoal in furthering "good" and discouraging "bad" 
soil organisms. That, and the evidence for huge pre-columbian 
populations in areas that are now depopulated. The "indios" who built 
and used t.p. - apparently for generations - were probably 
illiterate; it shouldn't take the equivalent of the Manhattan Project 
to find out how they did it! There is probably enough soils expertise 
on this list, and certainly enough reference material available free 
or cheaply, to get a solid grasp of t.p. hows and how-muches. And 
once that is in hand, huge crops sprouting from "exhausted" or 
"sterile" soils will do all the selling that is required.

>If we just keep doing our own, unscientific little experiments in 
>our backyards, nobody will take TP seriously.  That's why I think 
>advocacy and lobbying are quite important. They offer the key to 
>receiving money for real research.

Just because an experiment is performed in your backyard doesn't mean 
it has to be unscientific. All Mendel had was a small courtyard and 
some pots, after all; all Einstein had was his mind and his math. If 
you follow the scientific method, then you are doing science, and 
there's no reason not to take you seriously. I've learned a lot of 
useful information from a few cheap experiments in my front yard; not 
t.p. yet - just determining the salt tolerance of mung beans and the 
fertilizer value of canal sludge. The former showed that mung beans 
can give an excellent crop in salt-contaminated soil (they almost 
qualify as halophytes), the latter that people can fertilize their 
land just by cleaning out their silted-up drainage canals and using 
the spoil on their fields and orchards. Until I ran those tests it 
was generally believed here that canal spoil would poison soils, even 
though most of the sludge is...soil.

In any case, as I said before, the results will speak louder than any 
chart or table, louder than any peer review. The film that I 
downloaded on t.p. was eloquent - two plots side by side on cleared 
forest soil - one t.p., the other not...WOW.

Regards,
Marc