Michael: Can't wait to read your article
Malco: Thanks for the info on N20, definitly not a laughting matter
My News this week:
A prof at Virginia Tech will be starting a pilot project at a poultry farm near me next month.
Please contact me if any of you are interested in joining me on a field trip to Dayton VA to see Dr. Foster A Agblevor's chicken litter pyrolysis project.
I will set a date dependent upon the folks who contact me.
If any need a place to stay I've got plenty of room.
I will post more specs on Foster's project as I get them.
I feel like Dorothy in OZ,,,,,,,,, Who knew after all my searching's that this would fall into my own back yard.......there IS no place like home!
I have also made contacts and generated interest with several people at the Center for Innovative Science and Technology CISAT and James Madison University. Primary among these people is Dr. Wayne Teel who tells me he has many students wanting to do projects in this area.
The reason TP has elicited such interest on the horticultural side of it's benefits is this one static:
1 gram of charcoal cooked to 650C has a surface area of 400m2, now for conversion fun;
One ton of charcoal has a surface area of 400,000 Acres!! which is equal to 625 square miles!!
Now at a field application rate of 2 lbs/sq ft (which equals 1000 sqft/ton) or 43 tons/acre, this yields 26,000 Sq miles of surface area per Acre.
What this suggest to me is a potential of sequestering virgin forest amounts of carbon just in the soil alone, without counting the forest on top.
To take just one fairly representative example, in the classic Rothampstead experiments in England where arable land was allowed to revert to deciduous temperate woodland, soil organic carbon increased 300-400% from around 20 t/ha to 60-80 t/ha (or about 30-40 tons per acre) in less than a century (Jenkinson & Rayner 1977). The rapidity with which organic carbon can build up in soils is also indicated by examples of buried steppe soils formed during short-lived interstadial phases in Russia and Ukraine. Even though such warm, relatively moist phases usually lasted only a few hundred years, and started out from the skeletal loess desert/semi-desert soils of glacial conditions (with which they are inter-leaved), these buried steppe soils have all the rich organic content of a present-day chernozem soil that has had many thousands of years to build up its carbon (E. Zelikson, Russian Academy of Sciences, pers. comm., May 1994).
Quaternary carbon storage in global ecosystems
