The Biochar Miracle
Carbon pirates bury black gold… so future generations will be richer. – John Rogers
Biochar is being promoted as the soil saving miracle of the century promising outrageously high yields of crops as well as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The first video ‘The Promise of Biochar’ explains what biochar is, how valuable it is and how the Amazonian Indians used it to enhance fertility of the soil and promote carbon sequestration.
200 year old Brazilian soil [Terra Preta] which has been treated in this way was found to be ultra fertile and bio-diverse even centuries later. Also shown is an in-field experiment comparing the vast increase in crop production through using biochar techniques versus slash/burn or mineral fertilizer methods.
The second 24 minute long video — ‘Making Biochar with Jolly Roger Ovens’, details John Rogers’ latest experiment in a 5-year quest to make top quality biochar. The piece opens with a demonstration of the finished product in action followed by step by step info on construction of the biochar generator.
I though awhile back there was a blog post about how biochar wasn’t actually as good as it was said to be because it actually used up the humus faster. Here it is i found the link: https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/11/18/beware-the-biochar-initiative/
Hey Alan That post was based on a aspect of biochars properties.
Namely bury a whole lot of it together and it will eat away everything including itself. Science has come a long way since that and it should of been called when it was published.
At one time scientist proposed the mass burial of biochar to fix co2 in the air. At one other time scientist said the world was flat.
It shows 2 things your observant and a sceptic. Thats cool we need to examine those who examine things otherwise we would of killed the planet long ago.
The real benefit of biochar is a home for microbes and or nutrients. My mother used to say everything in moderation same is true for biochar. It is not a silver bullet but it takes out the MOST VALUABLE PLAYER award in the team sport of caring for the environment.
I have would like to congratulate uncle buck for the excellent work he has done incorporating all aspects into the jolly rogers oven or JRO. Its what my mentor Geoff Moxham allways wanted.
Simple accessable technology for everyone on earth. JRO is a smashing success.
Peace to the nation of mankind
Charmaster Dolph Cooke
Kunghur Australia
I’d like to point out:
We don’t know that terra pretta was made with wood charcoal. Wood charcoal is chunky and needs to be crushed to make effective biochar. You will discover that crushing wood charcoal, without machinery, is impractical on any serious scale. A home hearth does not produce a significant amount of charcoal. Before matches, people liked to keep thier fires going all the time, in which case, no charcoal is produced. And it seems unlikely that densely settled agricultural populations would cut, haul, stack, cover, and burn precious fuel just for a soil amendment.
For these reasons, it seems obvious to me that the charcoal in tera pretta is from grass or herbacious material (probably crop residue). It is easy to char a heap of soft vegetation like this, without a kiln, because the dense material smoulders and smothers itself, ecspecialy if it is green. Charred soft vegetation is extremely flakey, like charred paper. Merely spreading it out will pulverize it sufficiently.
There are people out there sawing up wood, building special kilns, and wasting all kinds of energy running wood charcoal through wheat grinders and such. It seems misguided. I can’t imagine any stone age people bothering with that. Pile-and-torch-on-site is a far more parsimonious method. Any organic matter will char. Wood may be the worst choice for this application.
Has anyone seen this newer evidence about humic substances in Science News recently? – “So-called humic soil substances, large compound molecules highly resistant to microbial assault and a focus of soil research for a century or more, are either rare or absent in detailed molecular and microscopic examination of soil. Previous studies have extracted small organic molecules from soil with acid and alkaline washes, while dark, resistant matter has been left behind. That dark matter was claimed as evidence of a distinct complex of interlinked molecules, the humic substances. But recent research has found no direct evidence for meaningful amounts of such distinct materials.”
Really worth the read as it’s ground breaking evidence – https://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/337548/title/Soil%E2%80%99s_Hidden_Secrets
I thought ash is acidic and increases the acidity of the soil, which will decrease its productivity.
Where I’m from, farmers used to set fire on the fields after the crops (barley, wheat, oat) were gathered, and the straw made into bales, to burn the remaining straws.
But recently a law was passed, forbidding this practice for the reason I mentioned.
According to this article (in Norwegian) biochar is truly a miracle, in Zambia increasing the harvests up to four times, and with potential to make the whole country climate neutral: https://www.forskning.no/artikler/2012/februar/314849
Some information in English here: https://www.ngi.no/en/Project-pages/Biochar/Home/
I compost, but don’t like to put meat bones in there, so I’ve taken to putting them in the wood stove. When we clear out the stove we have charred bones which I’m shoving on the garden here and there or in the compost pile. Does anyone have any comments on this. I’m no expert on char and here to learn everything I can. We also burn hardwood in the stove and often have heaps of char left over so that goes on the garden too as we prepare the beds for spring.
WOODASH – I thought woodash was more alkaline so I looked it up and found this “Wood ash does have fertilizer value, the amount varying somewhat with the species of wood being used. Generally, wood ash contains less than 10 percent potash, 1 percent phosphate and trace amounts of micro-nutrients such as iron, manganese, boron, copper and zinc. Trace amounts of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, nickel and chromium also may be present. Wood ash does not contain nitrogen.
The largest component of wood ash (about 25 percent) is calcium carbonate, a common liming material that increases soil alkalinity. Wood ash has a very fine particle size, so it reacts rapidly and completely in the soil. Although small amounts of nutrients are applied with wood ash, the main effect is that of a liming agent.
Increasing the alkalinity of the soil does affect plant nutrition. Nutrients are most readily available to plants when the soil is slightly acidic. As soil alkalinity increases and the pH rises above 7.0, nutrients such as phosphorus, iron, boron, manganese, copper, zinc and potassium become chemically tied to the soil and less available for plant use.
Applying small amounts of wood ash to most soils will not adversely affect your garden crops, and the ash does help replenish some nutrients. But because wood ash increases soil pH, adding large amounts can do more harm than good” Purdue University Horticulturist.