Pehaps the old behaviours of the long lost tera preta farmers lives on in the way amazonians behave in their gardens.?
following from above website and:
Creating Terra Preta in Homegardens?: A Preliminary Assessment.
Antoinette Winklerprins, Michigan State Univ
Saturday, 15 July 2006
133-7
This presentation is part of 133: 1.6B Amazonian Dark Earth Soils
(Terra Preta and Terra Preta Nova):
A Tribute to Wim Sombroek - Poster
Creating Terra Preta in Homegardens?: A Preliminary Assessment.
"Recent intensive ethnographic research in 50 home-gardens in the Brazilian Amazon demonstrates that gardeners could be creating terra preta through their daily actions of sweeping and burning garden and household debris.
This poster will explore preliminary data on these activities in the Municipality of Santarém, Pará, Brazil. Local residents, particularly smallholder farmers of mixed ethnic ancestry, utilize a soil management strategy locally termed terra quiemada (burned earth), to improve the soil quality in home-gardens in both rural and urban areas.
On a daily basis gardens are swept clear of leaf litter and other debris. This material is swept to an area of the yard where it accumulates and is sometimes combined with other organic household refuse. Periodically, often on a weekly basis, this debris is charred.
The remains of this process are then used as a soil conditioner and directly applied to the base of recently planted fruit trees and other productive plants in the garden.
Is this sweeping and burning activity something that will contribute to the eventual formation of ADEs? This is unclear at this time, but certainly the routine and pervasiveness of the activity, and the self-reported darkening of the soils through application of terra quiemada, indicates an area of potential future research.
Wim Sombroek's dream was to find ways of making terra preta (terra preta nova) and these preliminary findings in home-gardens offer some ideas how daily praxis may contribute to this.
Any biochemist/microbiologists here who can trasnslate this?:-
Saturday, 15 July 2006
133-9
This presentation is part of 133: 1.6B Amazonian Dark Earth Soils (Terra Preta and Terra Preta Nova): A Tribute to Wim Sombroek - Poster
Biodiversity in Amazonian Dark Earths Soils.
Maria de Lourdes P. Ruivo, MPEG, Belém, Brazil, Maria de L. Oliveira, UEPa, Belém, Brazil, and Dirse Kern, Museu paraense emílio Goldi, Av.Perimetral, 1901, Belém, Brazil.
Earths showed higher diversity, including a distinct higher number of the fungal and bacteria genuses, a lot of actinomycetes, and much occurrence of the organic substances and micelles distribution. These results show that ADE soils from Caxiuanã, Santarém and Manaus compared with at soils of the Roraima and Juruti. These organisms, important decomposers of organic matter, in the Dark Earths have more occurrences and more production of the organic substances and micelles. The identification tests showed the presence of gram-negative bacteria of the Achromobacter, Flavobacterium, Nitrobacter, Nitrosomonas, Pseudomonas, Escherichia, Enterobacter and Celovibrio genera; and gram-positive bacteria of the Arthrobacter, Bacillus, Micrococos, Streptomyces and Sarcina genera. Among these genera we can find cellulolythic, humic acid producers, lignine decomposers, starch decomposers and nitrogen producers. The fungi that were identified were from the genera: Rhizopus, Rhizomucor, Trichoderma, Cladosporium, Penicillium, Mucor, Aspergillus, Fusarium and Chaetomium. The analysis of Amazon anthropogenic soils indicate that alterations by human actions, such as the incorporation of organic residues and the effects of fire in the superficial horizon influenced some of the chemical (carbon, phosphorus,..) and physical (aggregation,..) characteristics. Studies of the soil micromorphology, chemical and biological show that the high fertility of anthropogenic soils are the result of a favorable combination of mineral and organic components, making these soils highly enriched in exchangeable forms. The organo-mineral stabilization of soil organic matter showed that is mainly stabilized via chemi-sorption to mineral surfaces, as well as physical stabilization via entrapment into interior of aggregates
