Quote:
Originally Posted by diazotrophicus
Hi Rev,
Jatropha is very useful, I have kept contact with Reinhard Henning of jatropha.de (English) for more than ten years now, and those wind breaks or live fences in Mali really are taking off. They now have 17 thousand kilometers of it. And each meter produces about one liter of oil per year. Go figure. That makes seventeen million liters, over four million gallons of oil, straight for the Listeroid field master.
But for agroforestry: the beneficial effect seems to be the synergy of nitrogen fixation, wind break, goat repellent, root growth factors and soil cover, aka living mulch.
And char in the soil works as a wick and storage medium for anything mobile, including water.
diazotrophicus
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Hi,
from my list of bookmarks some sites of interest showing plants and systems for soil improvement and biofuel production.
From Thailand some encouraging pictures about Sesbania rostrata, the world champion in nitrogen fixation (with Azorhizobium caulinodans living on the stem of Sesbania)
Pictures of the Systems
The amount of biomass is astounding, grows very fast in humid climate. If some of that biomass is turned into char and worked into the soll, as shown in the pics, you have the best of two worlds.
Also Azolla would be a fast growing source of biomass, fixing nitrogen on the way.
Role of green manure crops in lowland rice based farming system of northern Thailand
In the USA the land institute with Wes Jackson has good experience with native perennials
The Land Institute - Illinois Bundleflower: Prospects For A Perennial Seed Crop
And from Tasmania some encouraging report on getting more with less input
Farming for Fertility part 3
Spread the information, it is the only thing we have to distinguish us from our stone age ancestors.
diazotrophicus
