[Terrapreta] (correction) Re: New Article

[Richard Haard]

Me too

Thanks for responding Lou, this is very helpful considering your  
location. I want to refine this dialog in order to appeal to the  
institutions who should be engaged in the front end work to broaden  
the use of biochar in agriculture to the '300 to 500 million'  
subsistence farmers engaged in slash and burn agriculture in the humid  
tropics.

Yesterday, Erich posted a link to Biochar fund.com This is a very rich  
website  and is an example of an organization working in a venue where  
it is needed, Cameroon and Democratic Republic of Congo. Their page,  
What is biochar?  gives the basic information that has been offered by  
Drs Lehmann and Steiner
but yet has not been picked up by Rockefeller Foundation, et al  
because this technology has not yet reached mainstream. Biochar Fund's  
page 'Flexi-Pyrolysis' shows us how they are working in isolated  
communities of the forest frontier and how they are using producer gas  
from a small scale pyrolyser for 25 kwH village power plants.

Now I think this topic,  terra preta nova, and the use of charcoal in  
soil should be discussed as two separate chapters:
1.  temperate and arid zones, and 2. humid tropics with Oxisol soil  
environment

In the moist, temperate latitudes soils tend to retain organic matter  
longer, are less likely to be highly acid due to leaching, in many  
cases are nutrient enriched by 'recent' glacial deposition, soil  
respiration and microbial diversity and rates of population response  
are quite different from the humid tropics.  Research is now advancing  
in this arena by mainstream science and further experience is  
collectively gained by general interest. Nutrient management and  
cropping strategies for farmers and gardeners will improve as we learn  
more about charcoal use in this climate and to make it widely  
available. Here it is still a work in progress.

In the humid tropics, oxisol soil environment everything is different.  
The research has gone far enough to allow mainstream scientists  
recommendation for  a change in agricultural practice from shifting  
agriculture to slash and char. Here there are  300 to 500 million  
subsistence farmers clearing primary and secondary forest in order to  
crop a plot for 2-3 years before production crashes. In this periodic  
forest clearing process the  woody biomass is burned, releasing carbon  
to the atmosphere that amounts to 20 % of our global  greenhouse gas  
emissions from the tropics alone.

Yet Biochar fund.com and others on the ground in this difficult place  
to work have not yet intervened with practices of handling  
agricultural waste and forest slash to make biochar by smoldering  
combustion directly in the fields. Burning converts 1-2 5 of the  
biomass to char and smoldering combustion 40% or more. The solution  
that is offered by them is an appliance located in the village so they  
can transport the char back to the field for application. To use  
biofuels for village power is a good thing but what  percentage of ag  
waste and timber slash is converted? This then is a partial solution  
especially when the TPp creators used stone implements for land  
clearing and their lack of the steel axe alone prevented them from  
conducting shifting agriculture.

In the humid tropics this destructive land use cycle must be stopped.  
Is a village pyrolysis/power unit the answer? I do not think so. Great  
for demonstration of use of charcoal in soil but the farmers need to  
immerse themselves in slash and char production systems. At the same  
time as their work proceeds on independent track low technology, in  
field techniques need to be refined and education/workshops to spread  
this knowledge.

This anyway is why I attempted to use 'google' as a model , a grass  
roots application of a concept that can be done by anyone rather than  
wait for funding of a industrial appliance, a black box of science to  
accomplish what these 'primitives' did long before the industrial  
revolution.

Best

Rich

On Mar 11, 2008, at 5:47 AM, lou gold wrote:
> I should have said something like:
















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