[Terrapreta] New Article

[Richard Haard]

I have just authored a new article for our quarterly farm native plant  
catalog. Under separate cover I sent a copy of the pdf file to Tom to  
place in files section. The article title is Charcoal, Agriculture and  
Climate Change

In the article I was quite inspired by the approach used by Folke  
Gunther in his writing and power point show. My 1700 word essay is my  
own view of the issue and I hope distributing this will help to get  
this terra preta movement under way.

I am concerned that since terra preta as an open source movement its  
recognition as an agricultural practice will be slow to appear. The  
governments and the NGO's who will be the mechanism to make this  
practical application of charcoal in agriculture are responsive only   
to the business development model used in developing capitol intensive  
machinery and trade secret additives and are  better at competing for  
the attention. Yet here we have a technology that was widely used 1000  
years ago.  As advocate for this application of science Dr Lehmann has  
stated  terra preta nova (as Slash and Char)  is ready to put into the  
hands of farmers yet what is happening is governments and NGO's are  
waiting for the  use of charcoal in agriculture to appear in general  
practice. It is a catch 22 situation.

It seems to me the terra preta movement and connected carbon  
sequestration is waiting for a 'Google type' movement that brings in  
'the client' rather than a classical market development approach where  
the appliance or the patented/trade secret application penetrates a  
target market. It seems that charcoal as a open source agriculture  
technology is at a disadvantage when it would have a strong advantage  
if it were protected such as a software application.

Rich Haard, Bellingham, Wa.



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