Terra Preta - The parent thread which started it all

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by erich

P.S. There is nothing more satisfying to me as a gardener than hauling rich people's sh*t back to them and charging them for it.

LOL
You are full of quotable quotes.

Historically the Chinese market gardeners here must have thought the same way here, collecting their "night soil" and selling back cabbages

I am half way though an article on TP and Best Energies. When it is finished I would like them to read it first. Then I will either try to publish it or put it on the web. It might answer a few questions currently being asked.

[Michaelangelica]

On plants that do well on Terra preta

Page 117 Amazonian Dark Earths Lehman et al
"Crops with a high K requirements, such as bananas, may not grow as well as those crops witch have high P requirements, such as legumes.
. . .
Bean yields higher on ADE
. . .Corn no increased yield.
. . . Manioc 50% more increased growth"
p 117
BUT
Different types of ADE have different fertility and production potentials. (p120)
77% of ADEs sampled showed +itive incidence of Azospirillum spp ( free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria)

"Life was not meant to be easy"
Malcolm Frazer former PM of Oz

[malcolmf]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

What is the significance of "significant reductions in . . . N2O emissions from soil"

Nitrous oxide is a global warming gas whose effect is 296 times stronger than CO2 (methane is 23 times stronger). See global warming potentials (GWP) in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Fortunately we emit relatively little N2O compared with the carbon gases, but one of the sources is agricultural soil, I guess by decay of nitrogen compounds such as fertiliser. Its strength makes it about as important as methane from that source. So if as Rondon et al say charcoal reduces emissions by 40%, excellent! Another feather in TP's hat.

Rondon et al calculated the N2O + CH4 reduction to be relatively minor compared to the carbon sequestration in effect on overall GWP, but they didn't look at whether it recurs annually after a single charcoal addition in the first year. If it does, this could be a major hidden benefit. Could even be worth a govt paying farmers to spread charcoal in order to meet its climate commitments. Assuming of course you have a govt prepared to commit to anything.

M

[maikeru]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

On plants that do well on Terra preta

Page 117 Amazonian Dark Earths Lehman et al
"Crops with a high K requirements, such as bananas, may not grow as well as those crops witch have high P requirements, such as legumes.
. . .
Bean yields higher on ADE
. . .Corn no increased yield.
. . . Manioc 50% more increased growth"
p 117
BUT
Different types of ADE have different fertility and production potentials. (p120)
77% of ADEs sampled showed +itive incidence of Azospirillum spp ( free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria)

"Life was not meant to be easy"
Malcolm Frazer former PM of Oz

Couldn't you tailor the terra preta/biochar to have higher K values by adding such things as seaweed? That's something which I did for my terra preta pots in the beginning, and in some countries, seaweed is used as fertilizer.

[malcolmf]

Here is a list of char-making references, organised by type of design. The list combines previous links from this thread with other research. The list is restricted to items that convey at least some idea of the actual method / equipment used. Hopefully readers can judge the approach they could most easily adopt.

Simple technologies for charcoal making (FAO Forestry series) several designs: earth pits, earth mounds, brick kilns, metal kilns; well done UN!
How to Make Drawing Charcoal 3 designs (scroll for 2 & 3), DIY; for small quantities
English Charcoal, environment, history and woodmanship 2 designs; metal ring kiln; retort with gas feedback
ClayArt Archives charcoal method earth pit, DIY only briefly described
La Purisma Mission (find "pit is dug") earth pit, DIY only briefly described
Charcoal clamp earth mound, DIY
Mycroft In Flight Magazine (find "charcoal") barbeque firegrate, DIY
David G Mills posting 1, posting 2 metal can, DIY
Making Charcoal from Sugar Cane Leaves metal can, DIY only briefly described
A Charcoal Cooker metal pot, DIY
Top Five Things to Do With Oil Barrels When There's No More Oil To Fill Them oil drum, DIY
Making your own charcoal oil drum, DIY
Allotment Forestry local charcoal oil drum, DIY; scroll down for detailed instructions
How to build a small charcoal kiln oil drum, DIY
Charcoal Making at Home oil drum, skilled DIY
Fayette charcoal kiln permanent brick kiln
Convert Wood into Charcoal & Electricity permanent brick kiln, skilled DIY; char + fuel
Making charcoal and preserving wood metal oven; char + gas (used for preservation); some smoke containment
Flexi portable charcoal kiln metal ring kiln
Bramley Frith charcoal burning metal ring kiln; also a classic picture of smoke emissions
Charcoal burn metal ring kiln
Making Charcoal and Charcoal Retort retort with gas feedback; skilled DIY from 2 oil drums
Scott Bidstrup (find "efficient charcoal") solar furnace, skilled DIY, no evidence of use
Solar Parabolic Trough Charcoal Oven solar furnace, skilled DIY, account of prototype trial, no charcoal as of Jan 2007
BEST Pyrolysis, Inc. low-emission kiln; char + gas + heat (possibly low char yield to favour gasifier)
Carbon Diversion pressure vessel; high speed, high yield

Additions welcome

M

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by malcolmf

Nitrous oxide is a global warming gas whose effect is 296 times stronger than CO2 (methane is 23 times stronger). See global warming potentials (GWP) in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Tar
I thought it was just for dentists (laughing gas?)

How is it made?

This may be of interest

FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
to me

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22:44 (1 hour ago)
feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com

Soil Science has Changed

For Carol, over at the Garden Bloggers Book Club, who comments on a previous post:

...be interesting in knowing how soil science has changed in the last 25+ years. I took an introductory class in soil science in 1978 or 79. And I don't recall much discussion about what was living in the soil. Has that become more of an emphasis?

The short answer to that is, yes.

Let's take a bit of a look back to those times. I took my soils classes mostly in 1974 through 1976 at UC Davis.
One was a soil microbiology class, and it covered many of the soil-food-web fundamentals that Jeff Lowenfels expands on in "Teaming with Microbes", but it touched only briefly on species interdependence.
Ecology was a fairly new field at the time, and much that we know now as soil ecology was just a glimmer in our eyes.

I took an introductory level ecology class in 1973.
My recollection was this was only the second year an ecology class was available at UC Davis.

The emphasis in soil microbiology, at the time, was on the metabolic processes the soil biology contributes to nutrient cycling: respiration, immobilization, symbiotic nitrogen fixation, nitrification, ammonification. Carbon:nitrogen ratios of disked in residue were a big deal due to microbial immobilization.
There was a strong emphasis on bacteria, and I don't recall anything said about mycorrhizal fungi.

I remember a deep respect for the living component of soil among my pedologic-oriented instructors: "Dirt is soil without life" was drilled into us countless times whenever we slipped up and used the term "dirt" when we should have used "soil".

My edaphic-oriented instructors were not as soil biology oriented.
But this was before "soil health" and "soil quality" movements in agricultural soil science became established.
It was also before the interest in wetland soil process, bioremediation, protecting groundwater, and understanding why septic systems fail, combined to drive dramatic changes in edaphology.

Edaphology is the study of soil (edaphic) effects. Until about 25 years ago, it mostly synonymous with agricultural soil science as distinguished from pedology, the study of soil in its natural setting. Edaphology now encompasses the new field of environmental soil science, with its more formal emphasis on interdependent living processes in soil.

Soil science has gone through dramatic changes in the last 25+ years.

Picture Source: The Divine Soil
Originally uploaded by Room With A View.

Technorati Tags: soil science history ecology edaphology environment

[erich]

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

[Michaelangelica]

gret post erich

quickly some news

Posted Online: 2007-02-03
Carbon 'crop' options open
Comment on this story

By Mike Lyons

mlyons@daily-journal.com
815-937-3377

How's your carbon crop?

Well if you're a farmer in Illinois, Iowa and Indiana you're "raising" about a half ton of carbon per acre. Or at least that's what you can offer for sale to polluting corporations willing to pay cash for carbon credits.

The Daily Journal

The confusion is not without good reason. The market for offsets is highly fragmented, with prices ranging wildly from as little as $1 to about $20 per tonne of carbon dioxide. Firms dealing in offsets in the UK, the global centre for trading “carbon credits”, have grown in number by 60% a year since 2002. And these firms support a bewildering array of projects, from planting trees in Tanzania to building hydroelectricity plants in Bulgaria.

Ethical Corporation: Special Reports - Offsetting emissions – The carbon con?

[maikeru]

Very nice post Erich! I did not think that a ton of charcoal could have 400,000 acres worth of area in it...that is truly mind-boggling.

[erich]

NEWS This Week:
Dr. Danny Day called me last week when he was giving a talk at Roanoke collage, I encouraged him to stop by VT, which he did, and I found out last night when he called again saying that he had a great meeting with Scott Rogers, dept head of Biological Systems Engineering,( Foster's boss), sharing his work ,data base etc.

I'm expecting a full brief from a DOE chemical engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, about the range of next generation Hg scrubbing technology. He contacted me because of his interest in TP. He says that he and a few of his cohorts who evaluate IGCC and direct liquefaction proposals and scrubber technology for Coal Fired power plants, are following TP closely.



Here are all the links to Dr. Foster Agblevor's Project:
Foster described his poultry litter project to a colleague some months ago. At that
time he was considering using a fluided bed reactor for pyrolyzing the
litter. It will be interesting to learn about his progress.

Solving an Age-Old problem


Agricultural byproducts harvested to cultivate a greener Commonwealth

Agricultural byproducts harvested to cultivate a greener Commonwealth | Virginia Tech

"The Conversion of Poultry Litter to Value-Added Resources by Pyrolysis" - Dr. Foster Agblevor, Associate Professor, Virginia Tech to be presented at:
Water Solutions forum: Innovative Environmental Technologies Symposium

Innovative Environmental Technologies Symposium - February 22, 2007 - Rockingham County Fairgrounds - Harrisonburg, Virginia
February 22, 2007, Harrisonburg, VA

Agblevor's pyrolysis work led to high charcoal yields (~40%):
Improving the Quality of Bio-Oils from Poultry Litter Pyrolysis
http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/pr...apers/537g.pdf

Foster Agblevor and Sueng-Soo Kim

Disposal of poultry litter is becoming a major problem in the USA poultry industry because of environmental pressures and health concerns. However, poultry litter can be potentially converted into bio-oils, gas, and fertilizer. We investigated the fast pyrolysis of poultry litter into bio-oils and gaseous products. The bio-oil yields were relatively low (20 to 30%) compared to wood derived bio-oils and they had very high viscosities compared to wood and herbaceous bio-oils. The viscosity of the bio-oils were considerably reduced when the poultry litter was mixed with other feedstocks and co-pyrolized. The char yields were extremely high (>40%) compared to woody and herbaceous biomass. The high char yields were attributed to the high ash content of this feedstock. The char product had high concentrations of potassium, phosphorous, calcium, and nitrogen. The gaseous products yields were also very high.

Pyrolysis under catalytic conditions increased the gas yields considerably. Thus, pyrolysis technology can be used to dispose of poultry litter and simultaneously produce high-value products, and fuels.



I have joked for years with local farmers that chicken litter is just Iowa top soil imported to the Shenandoah valley in the form of corn, now at least we'll be able to keep it here rather than running off into the Chesapeake Bay.


Cheers,
Erich