Science Forums 2

[Taildragerdriver]

This is great discussion:

David:

It is good you are working on getting the folks in suburbia interested we all can do our part. I hope if we are sucessful in getting a charcoal plant going in my town we can start to make bags of good charcoal available to suburban folks at the garden store, as one of the members of the previous terra preta forum suggested, with some good documentation on how to use it. I think it could be pretty cheep and could help your cause as well.

I for one am glad I have never had to suffer the consequeses of what seems to me to be the "loss of freedom" you folks who live in urban areas have to put up with. I try to be a good neighbor by keeping noxious weeds down in my pastures and keeping my fences in pretty good shape but there is no enforcement of that kind of stuff in the world I live in. I'm not sure I would be able to restrain myself if somebody came along and told me to trim my bushes.

As for winners and loosers. One of the great things about terra preta vs golobal warming is that there are few loosers and lots of winners it seems to me. The only real loosers I can figure out are the chemical fertilizer companies because there is likely to be less demand for their products. But it turns out that they are really oil companies in large part and the oil companies benift from the carbon credits farmers sequestering carbon would produce so even they may not be too opposed.


Michaelangelica:

I have made some small amounts of charcoal from wood and I find I get about 40% by weight of the weight of the original dry wood. That is also what I read in the literature. I would be interested in any reference that describes getting a higher return. For our purposes the more the better. We will be documenting our experience for large scale operations this summer as we crank up bigger production.

As for your point about the need for fire, we need it too in our forests and range lands we just need it with less fuels so the fires are valuable not destructive. Removing this excess fuel could be useful for you as well.

RBlack:

I agree with your point about making terra preta cheep and easy to use. For farmers and gardners alike that is one of the reasons we have the proposal of producing this computer program that will help guide the user through what amendments to put in their soil.

The idea would be to take a soil sample, send it to your state extension service (at least in Oregon, may be different elsewhere) and have it tested. When you get the report back you type the results into the program and it will tell you what to add to the soil. How much charcaol etc.
This would probably be up on the web and be an instant return.

As for people making their own char I'm kind of skeptical that many people would really want to do that. My idea is that you could collect all the yard waist seperately and the garbage collector would deliver it to an urban charcoal plant and they would sell the product at low cost to the public. Seems more likely to work to me. I think that would work mostly because there seems to be a good chance we could produce energy from the charcoal making process so the charcoal production could be subsidized by the value of the energy and the saving of landfill space.

I want to give some positive feedback to the folks on the forum:

It is a great time for us all to explore ideas of how we can all make this work. This is an exciting time to bring back a very old idea and make it work in the modern world to solve our problems today. Exciting stuff for me, my work is all about science and ideas. I beleve we should make work and life fun. I hope you all enjoy this opportunity and feel good that we are working to benifit the planet and mankind all at once. Makes me feel good, hope it does for you all too.

Thanks

Taildragerdriver