Terra Preta in the news

[Michaelangelica]

Adriana Downie talks about Best Energies pyrolysis gasifier and making bio char (Terra Preta)

Adriana Downie talks about Best Energies pyrolysis gasifier and making bio char (Terra Preta) | Zero Emissions Climate Change Global Warming Solution

 

Ends with link to BEST's website

Scott Bilby: Adriana, I would like to say thank you for the interview this morning. It's been very informative and several times I must admit I have learnt things that I didn't know before and I'm sure our audience is wiser for you coming onto the program.

 

Adriana Downie: If they would like to know more information, we have a website BEST Energies, Inc. | Clean Energy from Biomass Waste Resources - Slow Pyrolysis - Essential Technologies Powering Biofuels - Creating green energy products - Madison, Wisconsin | Cashton, Wisconsin and there are some links there to articles that have a bit more information about terra preta and agrichar in soils and the pyrolysis technology.

[erich]

Farmers bringing message to the Food Crisis Summit in Rome expelled

Grain - Barcelona,Spain

Those involved in the action have been meeting with other civil society organisations at the Terra Preta* civil society forum, parallel to the FAO Summit. ...

 

 

 

GRAIN | Farmers bringing message to the Food Crisis Summit in Rome expelled

[scalbers]

Here's a Biopact article mentioning James Hansen's support of the biochar concept...

 

Bioenergy pact between Europe and Africa

[Michaelangelica]

A great article

I especially liked this

 

[Michaelangelica]

Video

Deep Green Blog Archive Biochar - Don Slater

Biochar - Don Slater

 

Don Slater explains the benefits of Biochar.

The existence of an anthropogenic and carbon © enriched dark soil in different parts of the world and especially in Amazonia (Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE) or Terra Preta de Índio) proves that the predominant Ferralsols and Acrisols can be transformed into fertile soils. Charcoal formation and deposition in soils seems to be a promising option to transfer an easily decomposable biomass into refractory soil organic matter (SOM) pools. The production of charcoal for soil amelioration purposes (slash and char) out of the aboveground biomass (secondary forest and crop residues) instead of converting it to carbon dioxide (CO2) through burning (slash and burn) could establish a C sink and could be an important step towards sustainability and SOM conservation in tropical agriculture.

http://www.biochar.org

[Michaelangelica]

A great article via Erich

Geotimes - July 2008 - Trends and Innovations

 

Christoph Steiner, a soil scientist at the University of Georgia, stands in the midst of a field of pepper plants in Brazil. These plants are being grown in terra preta — soil enriched hundreds of year ago with charcoal. The ordinary Amazonian soils do not support such productive agriculture.

[Michaelangelica]

Terra Preta

By Kira

“Terra Preta“, or “dark earth”, is an Amazonian Indian technology which can vastly improve soil fertility and pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, potentially keeping it out for thousands of years. Biomass - plant and animal waste .

. .

Terra Preta

 

“Terra Preta”, or “dark earth”, is an Amazonian Indian technology which can vastly improve soil fertility and pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, potentially keeping it out for thousands of years. Biomass - plant and animal waste such as manure, waste wood, and crop leftovers - can be turned into charcoal (or “biochar”) and then buried in agricultural soil, making rich black earth that plants grow very, very well in. Charcoal is extremely porous, and provides a perfect environment for beneficial soil microorganisms that help plants grow. It also holds water, and can greatly help crops to survive drought conditions.

..

Terra Preta | Seeking the World's Soul

Seeking the World's Soul - Seeking the World's Soul

[Michaelangelica]

Terra Preta

 

By Kira • July 11, 2008

 

“Terra Preta“, or “dark earth”, is an Amazonian Indian technology which can vastly improve soil fertility and pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, potentially keeping it out for thousands of years. Biomass - plant and animal waste such as manure, waste wood, and crop leftovers - can be turned into charcoal (or “biochar”) and then buried in agricultural soil, making rich black earth that plants grow very, very well in. Charcoal is extremely porous, and provides a perfect environment for beneficial soil microorganisms that help plants grow. It also holds water, and can greatly help crops to survive drought conditions.

 

Biochar can be used to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and potentially reverse global warming (if it were used on a wide enough scale).

Terra Preta | Seeking the World's Soul

[greenkira]

Hi, thanks for reposting the blurb from my site, kirahagen.com! I wrote it as a basic summary of terra preta information for a family member who works in tropical agroforestry and land management. Haven't had a chance to try any of it out at home yet, so if there are errors in the article please point them out.

 

Thanks again,

Kira Hagen

[Michaelangelica]

Hi, thanks for reposting the blurb from my site, kirahagen.com! I wrote it as a basic summary of terra preta information for a family member who works in tropical agroforestry and land management. Haven't had a chance to try any of it out at home yet, so if there are errors in the article please point them out.

 

Thanks again,

Kira Hagen

Sorry Kira, I tried very hard to find a mistake in your article but couldn't

Perhaps -a quibble_ 2,000 years seems a bit long. Maybe 1,000 years might be closer to the mark- but who knows?

[Michaelangelica]

Biochar Farming: The Next Big Thing

Biochar farming isn't a new concept. Indian farmers were the first to use it, and they referred to it as terra preta del Indio, which meant "Indian dark earth." They used charcoal and fish bones to fertilize the soil, and it created the perfect environment for growing crops.

The amounts of charcoal and fish bones as well as the procedure for this farming are not recorded, but biochar, a type of charcoal, has been looked at as providing similar benefits that the Indian farmers experienced.

 

In the event that farmers figure out how to properly use biochar to its fullest advantage, food shortages and global warming could be a worry of the past.

It's predicted that biochar farming can produce higher crop yields and decrease the use of chemical fertilizers.

In addition, biochar can store carbon for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years. So if left over crops are turned into charcoal, they can store the carbon longer and reduce the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere. The gases that are produced from charring the plants can be turned into carbon-negative bio-oil, which could be used to power a car.

 

According to Johannes Lehmann's research at Cornell University, biochar makes soil absorb better and achieve stability, which makes the soil better prepared to deal with erosion, weather changes and water contamination.

 

However, as with any solution, there are always drawbacks.

For example, overproducing charcoal can cause an increase amount of contamination into the environment.

Also there is not a market for carbon yet, and there isn't a monetary credit provided to farmers who use biochar.

In fact, Dynamotive, an energy company located in Vancouver, has been handing out biochar to any farmers who will try it.

 

Biochar may be dynamic enough to lessen some of the world's problems, but further research is necessary to examine its advantages and disadvantages.

But it's difficult to do this without knowing how to effectively incorporate biochar into our current farming practices.

It might have worked hundreds of years ago, but that doesn't mean it's the answer to the issues our world faces today.

For example, overproducing charcoal can cause an increase amount of contamination into the environment.Really?

[freeztar]

For example, overproducing charcoal can cause an increase amount of contamination into the environment.[/i]Really?

 

It's a rather vague statement. Who knows what they meant...

[erich]

Hi All,

This just in from biopact to the Biochar Yahoo group;

 

 

RESEARCHERS SAY THEY will optimise a system that produces heat and power and supplements fertilisers using a new intermediate pyrolyser fed by ash-rich biomass.

 

A research team led by Andreas Hornung of Aston University, UK, says that they will demonstrate that low-oil, high-ash biomass sourced from agriculture and forestry, including twigs and grass, can be used to generate electricity and produce a stable char suitable for carbon sequestration on farmland.

 

The fundamental part of the project is proving the intermediate pyrolyser where vapours pass directly to a gasifier for gasification. “We have tested the pyrolysis in a reactor and it works and we have had a gasifier running for seven years. The team will spend two years optimising the coupled system.”

 

The aim is to prove the entire integrated approach, and couple biomass driven processes to generate combined heat and power (CHP) from non-edible sources of biomass and also produce a char that can supplement fertiliser and sequester carbon more efficiently than CCS says Hornung.

 

 

News Detail - TCE Today

 

 

 

Apparently, the recently created European Bioenergy Research Institute (EBRI) , also headed by professor Hornung, is working on the same technology.

 

Check it out here:

 

Pioneering international research institute to launch at Aston University

 

Under the 'note to editors': "Collaboration with the Odenwald district in Germany to develop and establish the first highly integrated biomass based power plant with a negative CO2 impact through carbon sequestration."

 

 

Erich

[Michaelangelica]

TP in Australia

Methods that significantly enhance carbon sequestration in soil include no-till farming, residue mulching, cover cropping, and crop rotation, all of which are more widely used in organic farming than in conventional farming. Conversion to pastureland, particularly with good management of grazing, can sequester even more carbon in the soil.

 

Terra preta, an anthropogenic, high-carbon soil, is also being investigated as a sequestration mechanism. By pyrolysing biomass, about half of its carbon can be reduced to charcoal, which can persist in the soil for centuries, and makes a useful soil amendment, especially in tropical soils (biochar or agrichar).

 

Controlled burns on far north Australian savannas can result in an overall carbon sink. One working example is the West Arnhem Fire Management Agreement, started to bring "strategic fire management across 28,000 km² of Western Arnhem Land". Deliberately starting controlled burns early in the dry season results in a mosaic of burnt and unburnt country which reduces the area of burning compared with stronger, late dry season fires.

In the early dry season there are higher moisture levels, cooler temperatures, and lighter wind than later in the dry season; fires tend to go out overnight. Early controlled burns also results in a smaller proportion of the grass and tree biomass being burnt..

MyEBike.biz :: - geosequestration

 

Interesting but very dense article. Like being hit over the head with an old word processor (typewriter)

Still, lots of good info on CO2 Sequestration.

 

An article with lots of similarities here

Tree-Nation :: Carbon dioxide sink - Tree-Blog

 

 

GEOECOLOGY ENERGY ORGANISATION [GEO] is a registered Public Charitable Trust formed by people who have been closely associated with the work of various Institutions involved in ENVIRONMENTAL, CLIMATE CHANGE, NATURAL AND HUMAN RESOURCES - AGRICULTURE, TERRA PRETA, WATER, ENERGY, SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS, DISASTER MITIGATION AND RESPONSE, and INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY.

www.e-geo.org - _uacct = "UA-1735770-3"; urchinTracker();

 

A US political Forum that needs some help (erich?)

Terra Preta - PoliticalGroove Forums

 

Tree hugger forums

View topic - Terra Preta- Amazonian dark soil : TreeHugger Forums

 

Blog about glomalin

As a glycoprotein, glomalin stores carbon in both its protein and carbohydrate (glucose or sugar) subunits. It permeates organic matter, binding it to silt, sand, and clay particles. Not only does glomalin contain 30 to 40 percent carbon, but it also forms clumps of soil granules called aggregates. These add structure to soil, and keep other stored soil carbon from escaping.

 

Glomalin is causing a complete reexamination of what makes up soil organic matter. It is increasingly being included in studies of carbon storage and soil quality.

. . .

What interests me about all of this is the potential of the kind of biological matrix to reclaim nutrients that would otherwise wash right off fields and out of barn stalls straight into our rivers.

Would it be possible to grow soil this way instead of river algae?

If it is then there may be a way to take carbon out of our atmosphere, build soil, clean up agriculture and restore oxygen to our bodies of water by using nothing more than some charred wood and some fungus spores. Seen in this way the terra preta glomalin idea could be seen as a a kind of Roald Dahl magical sponge taking the crap out of our world and converting it into gold. Now that would be alchemy.

Since Terra Preta was popular… I bring you Glomalin Tokyo Babylon

 

A blog with an idea of using ashipping container as a charcoal maker.

Getting the job done - Biochar on the modern farm

 

Getting the job done on the modern farm is a challenge that needs to be confronted on a capital sensitive basis. A good analysis of the problems facing us comes from Tom Miles over at the Terra Preta website in links. I have also posted one of his posts today and the reader can get a taste of the current debate by visiting the Terra preta link.

Global Warming: Getting the job done - Biochar on the modern farm

[Michaelangelica]

But they also discovered swaths of terra preta—rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.

 

Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."

 

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.

 

When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone.

I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and "gosh." Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind.

Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

 

Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they work.

If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.

 

"Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this," Woods told me. "Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused." Indeed, Meggers's recent Latin American Antiquity article charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon can support agriculture are effectively telling "developers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint." Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in her view, "makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation." Doubtless there is something to this—although, as some of her critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats "perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chain saws." But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to learn.

Yahoo! 360° - The Big Sur Bohemian Club - America 1491-Part 4

[Michaelangelica]

Intersting article

 

Charcoal, agriculture and climate change | Energy Bulletin

 

Charcoal, agriculture and climate change

By bart

An emerging method for mitigating carbon emissions by burying charcoal needs advocates... It will take work on all fronts to reduce the carbon in our atmosphere, including this rediscovery of Amerindian agriculture — Terra Preta. ...

Energy Bulletin - - Full Newswire | Energy Bulletin

 

I found this comment especially interesting

 

 

Do not put fresh charcoal into the soil!

 

If you put fresh charcoal into soil the fertility might actually decrease. In addition, we have noticed charcoal has a hydrophobic property that needs to be biodegraded before water borne nutrients can be transmitted into the internal structure of what was once the vascular system of the plant. In the conditioning process, the large inner surface of charcoal causes nutrients to adhere making them temporarily unavailable

until the charcoal is saturated. Once saturated the charcoal becomes attractive to plant roots and soil microbes. Because of the inorganic nature of this substrate the charcoal will serve as an enrichment culture for nitrogen fixing and mycorrhizial partners.

I haven't found the char I use difficult to wet or especially hydroscopic. In fact quite the opposite.

I do grind it fairly finely. I do notice the big lumps remain dry although left in a sack in the rain.

What have others found?

[erich]

Great News,

 

I got a call this morning that National Geo's article on soils put TP front and center. It's not on their web site and I have not seen it yet, but headed to my dentist office for a good read.

Combined English and other language circulation is nearly nine million monthly with more than fifty million readers monthly!

 

I think it was Ron Larson , who first hinted this was coming after speaking to one of the editors.

 

Next stop , hopefully, The New York Times ( come on Michael Pollan ! )

 

Cheers,

Erich