Science Forums 2

[RBlack]

Taildragerdriver,

Good work on those projects. I hope you get all the funding you need. I had a wild idea last night that 100 years from now there won't be agricultural soil that does not have charcoal/biochar/carbon of one sort or the other in it! But then I have always been a dreamer!

Are you doing a baseline study with just charcoal? Or adding NPK or other variables? What controls do you envision on the parent material (pine, hardwood, or other), and the charring temperature? The reason I ask is that in all my reading on Terra Preta one thing that sticks out is that the variability of parent material, char temperature, and degree of char give lots of different results and often conflicting information. So I was wondering where you plan to start with and what type of soils and crops. I sometime think with all these variables that Terra Preta technology will turn out to be as much art as science. Another thought is that in dealing with soil and Terra Preta we need to look at second and third order effects of what we do. Example: What would be the crop yields of a field of corn the year after a nitrogen fixer like soybeans be and then how would that contrast with potatoes? Or the reverse order? We know some of this with regular soils but what about Terra Preta and at differing percentages of charcoal/carbon? Also the potential of Terra Preta science to manipulate the soil organic matter stability and the microbial makeup will be a huge factor in what we can do with it. Also how do we set up experiments that would isolate and examine any one of these factors or can we even do that since many of these factors are intertwined?

So if you have time let us know what is happening and it is great that we have people out there doing things and generating movement and discussion. Also let us know about that database and how to access the results.

RBlack