Terra Preta - The parent thread which started it all

[RBlack]

To malcolmf,

In a traditional method like yours, the energy must come from the combustion of some of the feedstock. You could easily waste a third of your feedstock if it is not dried.

What I do in my small (20 gallon) garbage can is get a good little fire going at the bottom, then put in some medium size pieces of wood, then on top of that 2 or 3 large pieces of wood or left over large pieces that didn't char the first time. This takes up 1/2 to 3/4 of the can and separates the heat source from what I want to char.

Living in the Black Hills of South Dakota one thing I don't have to worry about is starter material. We have dead wood everywhere! In fact the Forest Service pays to thin the forest and they leave these large piles of wood in tepee shapes. They sometimes even burn them. We also have lots of logging so when ever I need some fresh pine needle I just go and get their wastes.

Why I am trying to char pine needles is that I am soon moving to Colorado and in talking to a Colorado State University soil professor he was concerned that any process that raised the ph of the soil was not good because most of the soils on the Front Range are already too alkaline. In my reading on pine needles they are acidic and do lower the ph when mulched in/on soil. But not much and for not long. Also they do not degrade very fast. My idea is to find out if charring the needles will eliminate these 3 problems by the stability of the char and its ability for some to decompose quickly (kind of a contradiction but isn't that what fresh charcoal does?). My one concern is that the charring may drive off the acidic compounds that I am trying to get but until I do that I won't know. If adding a certain amount of pine needle char can control the ph level of the charcoal then we can use charcoal for both acidic and akaline soils.

In getting back to the Forest Service/logging wastes. All my life I always thought of what we could do with all the pine forest we have here in the west? Can we sustainiably use them to provide charcoal and other soil amendments? Right now every year we have massive forest fires that turn pine into CO2. Can we capture that through sustainable efforts and turn in into char? This is what I call a "pie in the sky" idea but again I already see the Forest Service/loggers thinning the forest so how much more effort would it take to turn some of their wastes to charcoal?

Another idea I think we should pursue (and I think one of your earlier posts mentioned this) is how can we amend a particular local soil by the parent stock of the char, charring temperatures, and by composting it with certain organic materials. I have read numerous composting articles and the information says you can design your compost to match your soil. All we do with the Terra Preta idea is use the physical and chemical properties of carbon to create a sustainable soil with all the benefits we know Terra Preta has. I firmly believe that many of Terra Preta benefits come from partial biochar of all kinds of organic wastes. One person posted the idea that we currently look mainly at first order effect when we do something to our soils. What about 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order affects that may happen 1, 2, 3, 4 years down the road. Example: I plan to use bone meal in some of my Terra Preta in place of the calcium/phosphorous that the Amazonian Indians had via their "fish residues and turtle shells". We know bone meal is a good fertilizer and the NPK amounts are listed on the box. That’s a first order effect. But what happens to the physical structure of bone meal a year later? 5 years later? What we put in the soil stays there and who know what a certain microbe might use 3 year old bone meal (or whatever is left or whatever it became) for?

Terra Preta is very complicated and we have lots of things to try.

RB

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by davidgmills

On the day before Valentine's day, I bought my wife some herbs and put them in a single pot with my homemade terra preta.

The news is bad for my cilantro. The rosemary is doing great.

What did I do wrong to my cilantro? Soil is well drained. TP stayed surprisingly moist. I am wondering if cilantro can not stand the excess water retention of TP. Any ideas?

Cilantro (Coriander) is a pain in the a**e to grow. It does not like its roots disturbed and goes to seed very quickly if they are. I grow Vietnamese mint (Rau Ram, Poliginum something) an easy to grow substitute
Water should not worry cilantro although it might worry rosemary.

I had some problems with Aquilegias that got upset with char (I think).

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by maikeru

Worse than having plants that don't grow is watching them be taken over by whiteflies. My mother purchased some herbs from the supermarket which have whiteflies, and they're in the same room as my garden, and my plants are infested...

Try a leaf spray of sea weed fertiliser and keep the water up to the plants. whitefly usually attack water stressed plants.

Originally Posted by maikeru

will probably use powdered activated charcoal, so I can make more pots more quickly and with less backbreaking effort. I

Thats cheating!
Environmentally it may use too much energy?
Here, activated charcoal for Hort. use (Barmac's "Pick Up") is $150 for about 5K !!
The supermarket sells 3.5K of BBQ charcoal ("Redhead") for AUD$7. It is made from coconuts, I think, comes from Malaysia, and is easy to break up with a brick.

Best Energies can make low quality activated charcoal at about 500C by adding water and air to the pyrolysis mix. Stephen Joseph says it does hold more water in the soil/potting mix.
Herbs don't always need lots of water especially Mediterranean ones like rosemary, thyme, lavender etc

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by malcolmf

No. But if you google "immunoreactive protein assay" you can see how standard it is. There are several kinds of assay, and my understanding is that immunoreactive glomalin is only a part of total glomalin and indicates more recently formed stuff, which helps to work out turnover rates. To me this also says that glomalin must be a catch-all word for something whose true detailed composition has yet to be determined.

M

Sorry no chemist, but how does that show the amount of carbon in glomalin?
ELISA SECONDARY ANTIBODY CONJUGATION
Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory : Glomalin
SpringerLink - Journal Article
It seems to just give you a protein value for glomalin??

[maikeru]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

Try a leaf spray of sea weed fertiliser and keep the water up to the plants. whitefly usually attack water stressed plants.

I'd like to, but much past experience and frustration with whiteflies tells me I probably won't win the battle. They adapt too quickly and reproduce every 24 hours. I can't exterminate them all, and they'll reach plague proportions. Too many plants and too many bushy, overgrown ones at that! I'm going to harvest everything that I can, wash and freeze them, and then restart. I'll clean up the room, remove infected supermarket plants, and let the room sit idle for a bit. Not so different from what I used to do in the lab when our tissue culture flasks got contaminated. And this time, I'll keep any plant which hasn't been grown by my hand out of the room. No exceptions even for family members.

Thats cheating!
Environmentally it may use too much energy?
Here, activated charcoal for Hort. use (Barmac's "Pick Up") is $150 for about 5K !!
The supermarket sells 3.5K of BBQ charcoal ("Redhead") for AUD$7. It is made from coconuts, I think, comes from Malaysia, and is easy to break up with a brick.

Best Energies can make low quality activated charcoal at about 500C by adding water and air to the pyrolysis mix. Stephen Joseph says it does hold more water in the soil/potting mix.
Herbs don't always need lots of water especially Mediterranean ones like rosemary, thyme, lavender etc

Yeah, I have some environmental concerns, but I also need to be practical. Unless I hold BBQs every week or get a burn permit so that I can create charcoal, I have to resort to smashing lump wood charcoal, which is the cheapest and best stuff I've found so far. Everything else is Kingsford or some other company coal charcoal (which may have heavy metals, etc.). I've looked into acquiring coconut charcoal, and it seems to be considered a "specialty" or "gourmet" charcoal here for BBQing and is more costly than lump wood.

My neighbors think I'm a weirdo when they've seen me crushing charcoal outside. I'm already a bit loopy, so I don't need to give them any more ideas. Anyway, I plan to put my homemade stuff into holes for new fruit trees and bushes in the backyard. I hope I've done some good in making that, at least.

I have most of the materials (seaweed, bonemeal, eggshells, coffee grounds, potting soil, etc.) on hand for new terra preta except powdered charcoal. Really, I need to make some more. I have several containers of spent coffee grounds from indulging in my bad habit the last few weeks!

[Michaelangelica]

[QUOTE]

Originally Posted by maikeru

I'd like to, but much past experience and frustration with whiteflies tells me I probably won't win the battle.

Yes best move; pyrethrum kills them if you can get it on them

Y
My neighbors think I'm a weirdo when they've seen me crushing charcoal outside. I'm already a bit loopy, so I don't need to give them any more ideas.

See post 85 which packed me up -LOL. The loopyness is spreading

I have most of the materials (seaweed, bonemeal, eggshells, coffee grounds, potting soil, etc.)

Smelly old fish heads?
(I was thinking of asking the local fish co-op to save them for me to make a poor pensioner's soup!)
Zealoite/kitty litter for clay? Or smash all your fly infested flower pots? That would give the neighbors something to talk about!

Thanks to those who have been saying nice things about all of us being clever people.
Seriously I think it is important.
The researchers do their job we do another.
(Try to make them comprehensible?)
IE.,
One Best Energies pyrolysis machines can churn out tonnes of charcoal a day. (and make it in a hundred different ways) I figgure this country needs a few hundred of them. So gardeners and farmers are going to have to create a market for that charcoal. Otherwise pyrolysis of our organic waste for energy and charcoal will never get off the ground.

We also need to know how to use different types of charcoal. Chicken shit charcoal has a pH of 9 but has lots of available calcium and fertiliser. How do you use that differently from paper-mill-slurry char? or rice hull char?(lots of silicon) or sea weed char (lots of trace elements?) or wood char??

What happens when we can get a carbon credit when we buy potting mix?
Or an office can get carbon credits for office plants grown in charcoal? When farmers can get credits?
Would you prefer to buy a plant grown in charcoal rather than peat moss, woodchips, perlite and vermiculite? Will you tell the supermarket/nursery plant-buyer that?
Then we will start to make a difference.
It has to start somewhere and it is starting here on the net as we all struggle with our incomplete knowledge of the process.

MY boast
I have a 12 month old (from cutting) 1m high Fig Tree with figs grown in home made TP mix. Will try and post a pic.

[Philip Small]

Via Gristmill:

We must come to see that the ultimate prize is not sitting on top of a pile of consumer goods; the ultimate prize is the miracle of our continued life on this beautiful planet. Unfortunately, Richard Branson's offering of a carbon-sequestration prize perpetuates the dangerous illusion that we can avoid the hard choices because Technological Man will always prevail.

That said, however, perhaps Branson's contest will surprise me. ...
... There is even a potentially revolutionary technique waiting to be developed that could greatly accelerate carbon storage in soils.

The technique is called "Terra Preta," Portuguese for "black earth." It is not new. It was invented by an ancient agricultural civilization in the Amazon that made charcoal and buried it the soil. The charcoal absorbs and holds nutrients from manure and supports beneficial microbes. Some of these fertile soils are more than 1000 years old. You can read more about Terra Preta in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann.

There is a company called Eprida that is developing a process to manufacture this agricultural charcoal with a biofuel as a co-product. Perhaps they will apply for the Earth Challenge prize and perhaps, if the judges are open to it, their process or some similar process will win the prize.

Survival requires that we restore a balance to our relationship with the Earth...

[erich]

Just Got email from the sculptors of this "Burning Man" project:

Untitled Document

Pretty Cool,

[erich]

Dear All,

I am extremely heartened by the very positive response to the idea of using of biochar in agriculture and horticulture and appreciate your desires to put it to immediate beneficial use in these systems.

My name is Janice Thies. I am a soil microbial ecologist. I have been working with Johannes Lehmann at Cornell University for the past 6 years on various aspects of terra preta (microbial ecology in its natural state) and agrichar (how microbial populations respond to adding biochar to soil). It took us three years to convince the National Science Foundation that we were on to something here and to obtain funding for some of the basic research that is necessary for us to provide the data needed to answer your questions with confidence. Hence, we are several years behind where we could have been if funding had been available earlier. Even now, we continue to seek support for doing the types of tests many of you are most interested in. The results of our NSF funded research are just now being published or written up, but we are still a long way from being able to answer everything.

Currently, there are 10 research laboratories around the world that are testing char made from bamboo that was prepared at 5 different temperatures in the range we believe is likely to provide char that will be most beneficial for both plant production and C sequestration purposes. Rob Flannigan prepared the char in China and has engaged us all to do a wide range of testing on it. So, we should have some news about what temperature range might be best reasonably soon, but it is still early days.

One of the reasons that Dr. Lehmann recommends caution in the use of biochar can be seen in the paper recently published by Christoph Steiner et al., mentioned in previous messages. He did get excellent plant growth responses to adding biochar - as long as mineral fertilizer was also used. When you look at plant growth in the biochar only treatment, growth was worse than doing nothing at all (check plots). In the nutrient-poor and highly leached soils of the tropics, the added biochar likely bound whatever nutrients were present in the soil solution and these became unavailable for plant uptake. These results should make you cautious as well. How fertile a soil needs to be for biochar not to reduce plant growth or exactly how much fertilizer and/or compost should be added to be sure there is good, sustained release of nutrients, will likely vary soil to soil and we simply do not have these data available at present to make proper recommendations. So, keep this in mind as you do your own trials with your own soils or mixes. Try to follow good design practices for your trials, with replicates, so that you can judge for yourself what amount and type of biochar works best in combination with what amounts and types of fertilizers or composts you use (depending on the philosophy behind your cultural practices).

As to the 'wee beasties' or 'critters' as I like to call them, we have made progress on this front over the last several years. Brendan O'Neill and Julie Grossman in my laboratory, Sui Mai Tsai, our Brazilian collaborator at CENA and the University of Sao Paulo, and Biqing Liang, and many others in Johannes Lehmann's laboratory have been characterizing microbial populations in three different terra preta soils and comparing these to the adjacent, unmodified soils near by to them. Brendan found that populations of culturable bacteria and fungi are higher in the terra preta soils, as compared to the unmodified soils, in all cases. Yet, Biqing found that the respiratory activity of these populations is lower (see Liang et al., 2006), even when fresh organic matter is added. This alone means that the turnover of organic matter is slower in the terra preta soils - suggesting that the presence of black C in the terra pretas is helping to stabilize labile organic matter and is itself not turning over in the short term. All good news for C sequestration. However, since the respiratory activity is lower (slower decomposition), this may lead to slower release of other mineral nutrient associated with the fresh organic inputs. In some circumstances this is a good thing (maintaining nutrient release over the growing season), in other circumstances (more immobilization), perhaps not. We need more work on this to understand the implications of these results more fully.

Julie Grossman, Brendan O'Neill, Lauren McPhillips and Dr. Tsai have all been working on the molecular ecology of these soils along with me. So far, what we know is that both bacterial and fungal communities differ strongly between the terra pretas and the unmodified soils, but that the populations are similar between the terra preta soils. These results are both interesting and encouraging. First, that the terra preta soils (sampled from sites many kilometers apart) are more similar to each other than to their closest unmodified soil (sampled within 500 m) tells us that the conditions in the terra pretas encourage the colonization of these soils by similar groups of organisms that are adapted them. Our group has been working on cloning and sequencing both isolates from the terra preta soils and DNA extracted directly from them. A number of bacteria that were isolated only from the terra preta soils are related to the actinomycetes, but have not yet been described yet and are not very closely related to other sequences of known organisms in the public genetic databases. This is also very interesting. Some of you will know that actinomycetes have many unusual metabolic capabilities and can degrade a very wide range of substrates. Also, many are thermophilic and play important roles in the composting process. We have yet to fully characterize these organisms, but are optimistic that in time we can make some recommendations about what organisms or combinations of organisms might make a good inoculant for container-based biochar use. Two papers describing these results are in their final editing stages and will be submitted for publication in the journal 'Microbial Ecology' within the next few weeks. So, keep an eye out for them in several months time.

I want to add a word of caution about getting too excited about glomalin. Another of my students, Daniel Clune, has been working on this topic and his work suggests that the glycoprotein referred to as 'glomalin' in the literature - operationally defined as the protein extractable in a citrate buffer with repeated autoclaving - is not what it has been purported to be. First, the proteins extractable by this method are from a wide range of sources, not just arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Second, it has a shorter turnover time than has been suggested. Third, in a test with hundreds of samples taken from field trials varying in age from 7 to 12 to 34 years, its relationship with aggregate stability is suggestive at best. Dan's work is also being written up right now and should also be submitted for publication soon.

Some field trials with bamboo char have been conducted in China, with very positive results. Look for upcoming papers from Dr. Zheng of the Bamboo Institute in Hangzhou. Another student in my laboratory, Hongyan Jin, is working with the soils from this experiment to characterize the abundance, activity and diversity of the soil bacteria and archaea. Her first results will be presented at the upcoming conference on Agrichar to be held in Terrigal, NSW, Australia, at the end of April/beginning of May this year. Please be sure to see her poster should you attend this conference.

Lastly, from my personal gardening experiences, I use spent charcoal from the filters of the 14 aquaria I maintain for my viewing pleasure. I combine it as about 5% of my mix with 65% peat moss, 10% vermicompost (from my worm bin in my basement where I compost all my household kitchen waste - aged and stabilized, not fresh!), 5-10% leaf mulch (composted on my leafy property in NY), 5-7% perlite to increase drainage, decrease bulk density and improve water retention and percolation, and some bone meal and blood meal (to taste :-) ). This makes an excellent potting mix for my indoor 'forest'. I am very much still playing around with this.

I hope this very long posting helps those of you feeling frustrated and wanting answers. Many labs are working on many fronts, but it is early days and we are trying to answer some fundamental questions first and then use the information to guide our field tests and recommendations.

I hope to meet some of you at the Agrichar Conference (see details at the conference website) http://www.iaiconference.org/images/IAI_brochure_5.pdf
The Cornell work and that of many of our colleagues in Brazil, China, the US, Australia and elsewhere will be presented, along with that of many others actively working on agrichar production and use around the world.

Good luck with your own testing and kind regards,

Janice Thies - jet25 at cornell.edu
719 Bradfield Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853



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[Michaelangelica]

Fascinating stuff carbon
If it can get down this small wow!
siRNA delivery into human T cells and primary cells with carbon-nanotube transporters

A promising approach to gene therapy involves short DNA fragments (interfering RNA) that bind to specific genes and block their "translation" into the corresponding, disease-related protein.

A stumbling block has been the efficient and targeted delivery of RNA into the cells. Researchers led by Hongjie Dai at Stanford University have chosen to use carbon nanotubes as their "means of transport". This has allowed them to successfully introduce RNA fragments that "switch off" the genes for special HIV-specific receptors and co-receptors on the cells' surface into human T-cells and primary blood cells.

HMS provides high quality single-walled
carbon nanotubes (SWNT) and a variety of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNT).
Our state-of-the-art proprietary chemical
vapor deposition (CVD) process enables
the production of nanotubes with controlled
Diameter and Length distributions, which can
be tailored for various applications.
Diameter

~ 1.3 nm

1.2 ~ 1.5 nm

~ 4 nm

I wonder if I should buy some for the garden?
Could my plants then have DNA Swapping Parties then?
SEE
Nanoscale materials SWNT MWNT Carbon Nanotubes sales for research and industry markets, Helix Material Solutions


Might as well get all the off topics off my chest
On indigenous burning i am discovering many other native peoples used fire other than Australian Aborigines But Yourkshiremen?

I am a "Who-dun-it" fan and love quirky detectives. I am currently delighting in Nicholas Rhea's delightful D.I. Montague Pluke He is an expert on horse troughs and local folklore. (Yes I know only in an English/UK book could you get this)
In the first few pages of "Prize Murder' we came across a body in a burnt field.

Just before this we get a little history of Yorkshire Moors. Pluke is talking to his long suffering wife, Millicent.I hope you find this quirky bit of information as interesting as I did.

"'A whole area of heather has been burnt away'
'It's a swidden, sometimes called a swizzen.' Pluke aired his knowledge.
'It's a result of controlled burning. It's done every year, often in march before the grouse start their nesting. The landowner burns off about a sixth of a given area of heather, then the following year it will be the turn of another sixth and so on, so that over a period of years, the entire mooreland is burnt.'
'Goodness! But why?'
'It destroys the old heather, clears and refreshes the ground and encourages new growth. New shoots of heather grow quickly and they're stronger and healthier than the old; the new shoots are needed to feed the grouse too, and in former times local people would remove the turf after the burning and use it for domestic fires.'
'So turf is not the same as peat? I know a lot of mooreland farms had peat fires,' said Millicent.
'That's right but they had turf fires too. turf burns more slowly and gives out a lot of heat with a very pleasant scent. The thick heather stems which survived the flames were collected for kindling to light home fires.Those stubby stalks were called cowls, they were collected in big bundles called boddins, the local way of saying burdens. Boddins o' cowls, as the local people called them.
The whole exercise of controlled burning was, and still is, a necessary, useful and very effective means of maintaining the moors.'"

P 14 -15