Biochar and Fertilization

There is an article in the latest online issue of National Geographic — in fact it is dated next month (September ‘08) — titled Our Good Earth. The last third of the article is about Terra Preta and Biochar, but the earlier parts are also interesting observations on the practical considerations farmers have to evaluate when treating their soil. Like the compaction caused by large farm equipment. And elsewhere human-induced erosion and desertification. By 2030 there will be over eight billion people on this earth, and we will need 30% more grain than we currently grow, which will be difficult if we continue to lose soil at the current rates.

But the article isn’t all doom and gloom.  The author looks at China, where terracing has created tremendous erosion problems — but he finds a place where they are creating solutions, returning the steepest slopes to natural grasses and trees, using moderate slopes for orchards rather than field crops, and growing their fields of millet and sorghum and corn on the lower, nearly level soils less prone to erosion.

Next the author turns to Africa, where he describes the success stories of the Sahel region, where here and there a drop of hope springs forth in an otherwise barren land. He describes huge and expensive projects sponsored by foreign governments, and simple local projects where farmers use traditional methods to restore soil fertility. Like cordons pierreux. In that process, long lines of fist-sized rocks are lined up on the hard crusted soil. As rains wash over the gentle slopes, the rocks hold it long enough to let some percolate into the ground, and to allow silt to settle out of the roiling waters. Plants grow in the silt, which in turn slow the water more, so that in time trees and shrubs grow.

Another traditional method involves digging holes in the field, and filling them with manure. Termites eat the manure and convert it into compost (termicompost?) while burrowing channels in the soil, loosening the texture. Trees planted in these holes then grow strongly, and their roots help break up more compacted soil, and their leaves add nutrients when they fall.

Finally, the article turns to Terra Preta and the promise of biochar. My title for this post is stolen directly from the last line in the article, a quote from geologist David Montgomery, from the University of Washington. We really do need to pay better attention to our soils, and give them the care they deserve. Who else is going to feed us?

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If you are going to be in Iowa next week, the Iowa State University (ISU) is going to have field-tours of their biofuel crops and biochar enriched fields. The ISU Ag Engineering and Agronomy Research Farm is near Ames, and the tours are open to the public for a $5 fee. Tours will be August 25th and August 29th, just before and just after the nearby Farm Progress Show in Boone. The tours will also feature a talk about ISU’s New Century Farm, the first integrated, sustainable biofuel feedstock production farm and processing facility in the U.S.

I’m looking forward to reading reports on this project, especially — of course — the biochar part. From what I’ve read in other contexts, this is not likely to be a case where dramatic visual differences can be seen in the biochar treated soil, versus untreated soil. Biochar seems to have the greatest benefit where the original soil is the poorest. With already rich soil, the benefits are more long-term. Certainly the carbon sequestration is important in any context. With rich soils (such as I assume they still have in Iowa) it is the reduced run-off of nutrients into the groundwater, better moisture retention during low-precipitation periods, and less frequent need for additional fertilizer, that are the important factors. All of those factors can be measured; one hopes they are doing so at ISU.

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I have just put up a new website called Support Biochar. This new site is a directory of websites that support the idea of spreading the news about biochar.

For now it has just three pages. The home page lists member sites (like this blog) in order by the amount of traffic they get. Those sites are divided into three categories, each of which gets a column on the page: sites that are about biochar, sites that contain some biochar information but are primarily on another topic, and sites that have no biochar content, but support the effort. Member sites put a little button on their sites like seen on this page, saying simply ‘Support Biochar’. The buttons come in three colors, black lettering on a white background, white lettering on a black background, and white lettering on a dark green background. The other two pages are one for joining the site, and one labeled ‘education’ that lists worthwhile sites for people interested in learning more about biochar.

If you have a website, be sure to join us and show your support for biochar education. Being listed on the site will help bring you more visitors, as they explore various sites listed. Putting one of the buttons on your site will help make the site more popular, increasing the interest in biochar. It’s win-win, just like biochar.

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Our Biochar Clip
(Just for fun):

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I’ve added a new page under the ‘Experiments’ section. Those page links used to be in the right column, but since I’ve changed the layout of this blog a bit they are now in the top row, beneath the title. Just click on the ‘Experiments’ tag and you will see the Bokashi experiment listed. It was, sad to say, a failure.

Here in Mexico we have been unable to find the EM (Effective Microorganisms) upon which the Bokashi method rests, so we decided to try to make our own. Apparently, the wild yeast I caught (using basic Sourdough techniques) must have been accompanied by acetic acid bacteria, since our bacteria impregnated wheat bran smelled like vinegar. We tried using it anyhow.

After ten days of adding table scraps sprinkled with the Bokashi mix, our bucket was 3/4 full and smelled pretty bad. I don’t think it was as bad as it would have been had we not added any bacteria, but still it was not right. Every time Isabel opened the bucket to add new material the whole kitchen would smell. Not good.

So we have declared that experiment a failure, and will continue to look for EM to make its appearance here in Mexico. We did find one place on-line that claimed to sell it here, but our emails went unanswered. We will be moving to Colima in another month, and have lots of composting projects planned (I want to compare composting with and without biochar), but for now Bokashi will not be one of them. Someone down there does sell worms for vermiculture, so we will also be trying vermicomposting.

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Note: This is the first in a series of reviews of websites related to biochar. All of the site review posts will be listed under the ‘Site Review’ category, providing a simple way for readers to locate and evaluate the information about biochar that is available online. If you would like to recommend a site for review, simply join this site and post a comment to any existing site review blog post.

Cornell University has two large sections of their website devoted to biochar topics, Terra Preta and Biochar (Agrichar), both run by Johannes Lehmann, one of the foremost biochar researchers. This review is for the Terra Preta section, we will cover the biochar (agrichar) section in a future post.

The title for this part of the website is Terra Preta de Indio. In his introduction on the home page, Dr Lehmann briefly describes the origin and character of the Terra Preta soils of the Amazon, and describes the implications for carbon sequestration to fight global warming, and soil fertility to reduce depletion of the rain-forest. While this introduction provides a succinct overview, it is written for other scientists and researchers, not the lay public, with sentences like:

In addition to their high soil organic matter contents as mentioned above, Amazonian Dark Earths are characterized by high P contents reaching 200-400 mg P/kg, and higher cation exchange capacity, pH and base saturation than surrounding soils (Sombroek, 1966; Smith, 1980; Kern and Kämpf, 1989; Sombroek et al., 1993; Glaser et al., 2000; Lehmann et al., 2003; Liang et al., 2006).

What he means to say is that the Terra Preta soils retain nutrients better, with more phosphorus and less acidity than surrounding soils, and they have chemical properties indicative of high-fertility.

There are two navigation bars on the site, one across the top with five links, and one in the left column with six buttons — other than the home page, these are not redundant, even though some seem to address similar subject areas. So ‘Research’ leads to a different page than ‘Projects’ and ‘Publications’ is different from ‘References’. The buttons on the left are repeated in the biochar (agrichar) section of the site, and point to the same pages in both.

Some pages do not seem to have been updated since 2005, but the ‘Publications’ page is kept current. That is the most important page on the site, with nearly 100 links to published reports. It is the most comprehensive guide to the scientific literature behind biochar research that I have seen.

The research section is a bit disappointing in that it lists 13 projects, but only six have links to reports, and a couple of those reports are very superficial. One just takes you back to the Terra Preta home page while another takes you to the Biochar (Agrichar) section home page. I’ll describe these in more detail in the next post in this series, which will cover the Biochar (Agrichar) section of the site.

Overall, this site is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand in-depth the background of scientific research on biochar. Despite the name, this site does not provide much information about the cultural origin of the Terra Preta soils, but it is full of information on the soil chemistry.

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