[Terrapreta] Char charged vermicomposting trial---They like it!

[Sean K. Barry]

Hi Frank,

I think I heard once from a sustainable farming researcher in Wisconsin that Savanna, Steppes, or Cerrato is an ecosystem that is 7 times more photosynthetically active than an acre of corn.  It is the most photosynthetically active of all plant ecosystems today, I think he said?  
This would be what I would imagine is more this primordial, original state.  With this kind of a change in agrarian management, then our acres of corn, rice, sorghum, soy, cotton, and now energy, etc crops will need be planted amongst shrubbery and tree laden hillsides and grasslands.

Folke Gunthur talks about using 20' industrial hemp stands as a biomass feedstock.  Others have spoken of Miscanthus, Elephant grass, and Salix (Willow) as feedstocks for cellulosic biomass.  Hemp: 22 tonnes dry weight and 6 ton charred per acre is a huge amount of biomass on a hectare.

The Terra Preta is seemingly more like a complex mixture, of compost, SOM/SOC, mineral charcoal, and living soil microorganisms, maybe?  TP looks like it is built over time with the growth of soil microorganisms and plant components in the rhizosphere, probably vermiculture, and other active "living organics" in soil.

The "bloom" in plant growth appreciated with TP has to occur after the activation in the soil of this whole ecosystem: the plants, soil microorgansims, charcoal, water, minerals, and native soil mixture.  The soil is that which creates the conditions for the soil to help produce the increased plant growth.  The native soils without those properties cannot produce or sustain the same kind of plant growth.  Sustaining Terra Preta-like performance in soil probably depends on concentrating essential nutrients into good nutrient holding soils, too.

I think more charcoal means more nutrient holding capacity in some way.  The sheer volume of surface crater, nook, and cranny on a lot of "bits of charcoal" must be enormous.  Just guesstimating @ (~0.2 hectare/gram), then * (5 metric tonnes (10E6 grams)/hectare), the surface area on 5 tons of charcoal per hectare just covers a hectare!  The microbes are the nutrient holding capacity in the soil.  The charcoal is the place where they live and do that.  So, more charcoal (and surface area) in the soil means more fertility per surface area on the site.  Maybe the Inca royalty had more charcoal and bones buried in the ground on their sites, huh?

After lets say, charring all or some of the biomass on a hectare of soil, putting that charcoal into that hectare of soil, then letting it return to native plants, to get more charcoal onto the ground means charring all or some of the biomass on that hectare of land again, or getting more biomass from other areas, charring that, and applying it onto that original hectare.  It you want to keep the plants on that hectare, then you get the biomass from other areas.  As long as you do this, you continually import new and more minerals with the charcoal from the other feedstock sites.

I think it is this built up concentration of minerals, charcoal, and living organisms that create these banks of Terra Preta in the soil.  By definition, since humankind probably didn't have other than human powered mechanical equipment, making Terra Preta was a site specific endeavor originally.  The addition of mineral sources from outside the TP sites, which must have occurred, I think, could be an important key to making a TP formation.  It speaks to charcoal and fertility management together, for sure, don't' you think?

Regards,

SKB


Hi Frank,

I wondered if you could answer this.  In full climax ecosystems like you speak of, how does this plant/soil ecosystem change the C:N ratio in the soil?  Does nitrogen fixation come into play in these ecosystems more than others?

Regards,

SKB
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Frank Teuton<mailto:fteuton at videotron.ca> 
  To: Sean K. Barry<mailto:sean.barry at juno.com> ; Dan Culbertson<mailto:danculb at netcommander.com> ; Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org<mailto:Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org> 
  Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 11:27 AM
  Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Char charged vermicomposting trial---They like it!


  Hi Sean,

  My complaint is focused on your not seeing the contingent character of biomass production. Imagine an acre of corn...in Iowa, in Ontario, in Africa.....think of different management schemes, organic, conventional, no-till....imagine what that acre was in its full climax ecosystem state before being converted by man.

  That last image represents the full tank of the carbon reservoir. All agro-ecosystem versions represent a tiny fraction of the full tank. In many scenarios corn production results in a net loss of SOM; if you take corn stover out of the process for biochar production you accelerate this process.

  http://agron.scijournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/6/1665<http://agron.scijournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/6/1665>

  OTOH, if that acre were in climax forest right at equilibrium for CO2 production and consumption, you could selectively harvest woody matter for charring out of that acre while keeping the reservoir full and even overfilling it using biochar as a soil amendment (probably want to apply it before leaf drop every autumn for best worm attraction.) In that scenario rather than further degrading a piece of already degraded land, you could achieve a 'Full Tank Plus' status.

  I hope we can agree that making biochar from organic matter on soils already starved for organic matter is robbing Peter to pay Paul in a descending spiral; it is only when you can make biochar in an ascending spiral that you will actually be doing something positive.

  IOW, there is nothing automatic about the statment that making biochar from biomass CANNOT increase atmospheric CO2...under many scenarios it certainly can, by further emptying carbon from the soil organic matter and biomass reservoirs in particular situations. The assumption that these will willy nilly refill themselves is simply mistaken, both historically and in many cases under modern conditions as well.

  Frank Teuton
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Sean K. Barry<mailto:sean.barry at juno.com> 
    To: Dan Culbertson<mailto:danculb at netcommander.com> ; Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org<mailto:Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org> ; Frank Teuton<mailto:fteuton at videotron.ca> 
    Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 1:56 AM
    Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Char charged vermicomposting trial---They like it!


    Hi Frank,

    You quoted me to make some point counter to an argument that I do not think I was making.  Nor am I even arguing against what you say here.

    The list also has a seemingly incorrigible blind spot vis a vis biological reservoirs of carbon and the current excess atmospheric CO2 levels. Hear Sean K. Barry repeating the faulty mantra:

    "Biomass can produce gases from combustion which are classified as GHGs.  However (and this is a critically important distinction), burning biomass CANNOT increase GHG concentrations in the atmosphere!  The cellulose, hemi-cellulose, lignin, sugars, and starch, that are in biomass are made via photosynthesis when the plants are growing and taking CO2 and H2O from the Biosphere.  Releasing those gases back into the atmosphere, there is no net gain."

    This just FAILS to understand that biological reservoirs of carbon are in many cases being depleted and never restored; deforestation, soil organic matter depletion through tillage, even overfishing oceans....human behaviors involving biomass reductions which are never recovered from. The tallgrass prairies on the Great Plains are now soil eroded wheat fields; the stored carbon that was there is now mostly aloft (in an equilibrium sense). The huge forests that once occupied the eastern United States and Canada are now mere striplings compared to their former grandeur. Look at old manifests of clear lumber for the now unheard of sizes of hardwoods and softwoods....these giants are long gone.

    Carbon in living biomass (or just harvested/cut down, fresh stover, or about to be composted biomass) all came from CO2 in the atmosphere.  I do not think that you or anyone else on the list would dispute this.  Fossil carbon comes from deep under the rhizosphere in the ground and did not come from the atmosphere.  No dispute here either, right?

    Burning one (freshly grown, renewable, and naturally renewing, biomass carbon) does not increase the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere and burning the other (fossil carbon) does.  We cannot reduce biological carbon stores and make it all into charcoal.  We have to selectively reduce to charcoal only that biomass which would otherwise decay and release the CO2.  We cannot cut down forests to make charcoal.  That is the only point I was making.  You are right that humans have degraded the land and the soils and the seas.  We have harvested huge amounts of biomass resources and blown much of it up into the atmosphere.  More than nature did before we got a hold of the biomass.  We did not do the carbon recovery back into the land that Nature does either.

    Nonetheless, making charcoal out of some biomass carbon and burning some back into the air is a far better choice to make than continuing to burn fossil carbon fuels and increase the atmospheric CO2 concentrations (as only burning fossil fuels can).

    Faulty mantra?

    Regards,

    SKB

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