[Terrapreta] (correction) Re: New Article

[lou gold]

I should have said something like:

Do you really want to build terra preta into this "proprietary model"? Let
me humbly suggest that, if this happens, terra preta may never be able to
deliver its full promise. Why not? Because *industrial age
* profit is fundamentally rooted in scarcity and not in abundance. *The
struggle now is to apply information age profit-making to agriculture.* I
believe that you are correct in understanding that the movers and shakers of
agri-business are not advancing terra preta. Do you see a beneficial and
benign way to get them to do so?


On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 9:31 AM, lou gold <lou.gold at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> Your thoughts are marvelously provocative -- really got me thinking.
> I have a somewhat different take that I would like to share.
>
> I think the "google example" is more in the "open source" (freeware) model
> than you suggest. What they did was to open up a service (search) to all
> free of charge. Yes, they don't give the source code for the algorithym or
> access to the inner workings of the program but they opened a whole new
> world for free. This generated traffic and traffic generated the demand for
> other services like advertising, etc which were held as proprietary and
> generated a fortune -- no, many, many fortunes.
>
> If I were to carry this model into terra preta, I would say the first step
> is to open it to all -- massively subsidize the production of agrichar and
> give it away. Then let the peripheral services appear for charge --
> packaging, distributing, etc of the char and sale of the products growing
> from a more fertile earth. In other words, create an infrastructure of
> abundance and let everyone benefit.
>
> Where's the rub? I'm afraid that both the existing petro- and agri-
> industries are formatted to profit from scarcity. Their depleting
> technologies GUARANTEE higher and higher demand and lower and lower supply
> of both fossil fuel and productive soil. This, as we can see in the daily
> news, is both a formula for the perfect storm and for record profits.
>
> Do you really want to build terra preta into this "proprietary model"? Let
> me humbly suggest that, if this happens, terra preta may never be able to
> deliver its full promise. Why not? Because profit is fundamentally rooted in
> scarcity and not in abundance. I believe that you are correct in
> understanding that the movers and shakers of agri-business are not advancing
> terra preta. Do you see a beneficial and benign way to get them to do so?
>
> Thank again for stimulating me to write this.
>
> hugs,
>
> lou
>
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:15 PM, Richard Haard <richrd at nas.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Terrapreta mailing list
> > Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
> > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/biochar/
> > http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org
> > http://info.bioenergylists.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> http://lougold.blogspot.com/
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/visionshare/sets/




-- 
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