Science Forums 2

[Taildragerdriver]

RBlack:

I have been working on a project that could answer your three questions and hope we are on track to start doing so in a scientifically supportable way.

I haven't had time recently to be involved in any of the threads I had been in. I have been working with Los Alamos National Lab to develop a proposal to get a grant to test Terra Preta in two situations.

One is an operational test on 7.5 acres of farmland where we would take forest excess fuels from the Wildland Urban Interface and make about 100 tons of charcoal and put that charcoal on this farmland and document the inputs and measure the outputs.

Also Texas A&M would be funded to do a greenhouse study to test similar concepts on a variety of soils and treatments.

The goal of this study if funded it to create a soil computer program that would describe how to modify a soil for a farmer to get the maximum benefit from adding charcoal,etc.

The goal is to make the use of charcoal attractive to large numbers of farmers to create a large demand so the large amounts of sequestration could go forward in this country and throughout the world. Taking advantage of all the benefits of Terra Preta is the desired result.

It is understood that we need to move the science forward before we can take advantage of this technology. The computer program will not be perfect after these initial studies but the foundation of information will be put in place and will continue to improve as more and more work is done by entities such as the various state Agricultural Experiment Stations. This computer program would of course use all the data in existing studies and from these new operational studies. When the program is relatively complete it would be delivered to the NRCS farm service centers throughout the US and possibly the rest of the world with the UN for example.

It is hoped this can also be the foundation of responding to some of the challenges stated in this thread. As with any grant application we may not get funded I will try to keep some posting on that in this thread.

Thanks

Taildragerdriver