biochar! what’s ancient is new again

part 1 of the 'vibrant soil is life' series

A grove of Guadua angustifolia bamboo growing in Costa Rica - a rapid growing, dense biomass. The air inside this grove was exhilarating.

Welcome back you rowdy bunch of free thinking, freedom loving, wild and crazy guerilla gardeners and farmers.

the pivot

Considering the state of affairs in the world today it seems timely to broaden the scope of this blog. Don’t get me wrong. I like to think that the previous 72 articles, those that exposed the breathlessly elaborate lies and misdirection that the big pharma/tech/media cartels have tried to impose upon us over the past two years, were needed. While I feel it’s important to remain informed about all of the shenanigans being put before us by these psychopaths, I think it’s equally important to know how to bypass the phony infrastructure upon which they would have us be dependent, one they own and control as a means to control us and enrich themselves - all to our loss of freedom, health and wealth. For far too long we’ve been made to dance to the tune these elites play, but we can free ourselves from the slavery of their dystopian world and we can begin to do so by producing our own food, water, textiles and housing.

Additionally, we’ll be considering how to do all of this in ways that keep our money circulating in the local economy to help support local mom and pop businesses - all of which increases the chance that our money finds its way back in our pockets. The corporate model does not want that to occur - it wants our money to end up at some off shore, corporate bank.

Regular readers will have noticed that the pivot began two weeks ago when I brought up the topic of prepping for potential food shortages and how chickens can play a role in those preparations. Those of you who are thinking about getting chickens or have recently acquired some may want to read last weeks piece where I took a deeper dive into the keeping of chickens.

In addition to considering other small livestock breeds that can be raised on small parcels of land and in large backyards, we’ll be looking into textiles, natural building, rain water harvesting, local economies and alternative financing. But today I want to begin a series of articles that go to the very core of so many of our modern health issues, one of the primary reasons why 54% of Americans now suffer from some form of chronic illness… the soil beneath our feet.

downward

Across most of the world today farm soils have been terribly depleted by modern farming practices. Monocropping may be profitable for big Ag, but it’s death to the soil. The constant tillage and application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have killed the foundation of soil fertility, the soil biome, across millions of acres of farmland around the world.

Soil is a dark, quiet environment that does not want to be disturbed. It’s happiest and most fertile when it has an abundance of roots, mycelium, mycorrhizae, worms, grubs, nematodes and millions of other soil fauna and microbes thoroughly permeating it. Modern agriculture and it’s tractors and the implements they pull and the chemicals used are the antithesis to all of that.

monocropped cotton fields in Arizona

As a modern cotton farmer in Safford, Arizona once told me, “The soil just holds up the cotton plants. We mine the soil to grow cotton.” Those vast cotton fields along the Gila river near Safford were once home to one of the most magnificent riparian habitats in the South West US, a habitat that supported a complex forest of native trees, shrubs, grasses and forbs. The abundance of nutrient dense food produced in that native ecosystem along with the native fish in the Gila river, once supplied all of the food needed for the numerous tribes of Native Americans that lived along that river, and did so for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the white man.

That richly diverse, native habitat was mindlessly ripped out 100 years ago to grow a perverse monocrop of cotton, the most water greedy crop in the driest state in the US, Arizona. Since that time, those deep alluvial soils have literally been mined to death. The result is that today nothing will grow in those cotton fields without huge inputs of energy intensive fertilizer and excessive amounts of water drawn from the Gila river. If you’ve ever wondered why cotton sheets and clothing don’t hold up as well as they did 50 years ago, its due to the same issue that lies at the root of our nutrient poor food… the death of soil and the ensuing loss of important soil micronutrients. In the same way food crops cannot produce robust, nutrient dense harvests when grown in depleted soil (and cannot properly support the health of people who eat them), cotton plants cannot produce a strong, robust fiber when grown in depleted soil.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that in order to survive over the long term, we need to move away from the seemingly quick and easy, modern, but very resource intensive approach - the approach elites have erroneously been teaching in ag schools across the land - and begin anew from scratch. We’re talking fundamentals here folks. How do we most efficiently return the fertility of our farm (and backyard) soils to the levels they were at prior to the arrival of the white man? What natural resources can we use that will help us achieve this goal without further depleting dwindling resources and causing more pollution in the process?

To answer that question we need to consider what the soil needs to perform its beautifully elaborate dance with soil flora and fauna. The answer is simple… organic matter. In every case of depleted soil around the world the primary missing agent is organic matter. Organic matter is the foundation of all life in the soil and without life in the soil there can be no complex fertility. This explains why lands that are rich in vegetation also typically have rich, dark, loamy soils - a sign of abundant organic matter.

Of course getting back to where we need to be is more complicated than that. But we’ll get deeper into those more esoteric topics as we go along in this series. Today I want to talk about one thing that everyone can now do that would have been very difficult to do just 10 years ago… I’m talking about how to use biochar to speed up and maintain long term fertility in the soil.

The following was one of a series of columns called “The Almanac Of Sustainable Living” that I wrote for our local newspaper in the summer of 2008. It’s been updated for this posting.

If you haven’t heard about biochar, you’re in the majority. It recently [just prior to the original publication of this piece] came into existence as a term describing the use of charcoal as a means to greatly improve long term biological activity in the soil. However, the use of biochar as a natural soil amendment is ancient. I first came across terra preta (that’s what Brazilians call it - black earth) early in 2007 while reading the book “1491” by Charles C. Mann. If you haven’t read that book, I recommend it.

Mann conducted detailed research into what the North and South American continents were like prior to the arrival of Columbus. Turns out the Americas were not the empty, primitive places that we’ve been taught. In fact there was a civilization living in the Amazon 6,000 years ago that was doing something so advanced that scientists are still trying to understand it today. Instead of slashing and burning the rain forest as is done today to clear a plot of land for farming, this ancient culture turned the forest into charcoal and then buried that charcoal in the soil along with all their food bones, excrement and pottery shards. This occurred across vast sweeps of the Amazon basin. Yup, it was a very highly evolved culture.

Ensuing generations then grew crops in that medium for hundreds of years without ever having to add any further amendments. Today, 6,000 years later, some of the biocharred soils that were rediscovered in the first half of the 1900’s have been intensively farmed since then, without any additional inputs to increase fertility. And this doesn’t include the hundreds or thousands of years it was farmed by the people who created it, let alone the thousands of years that have passed since it’s creation, during which time that soil has supported some of the most magnificent tropical rain forests on earth.

How did those supposedly primitive people determine that biochar had these incredible properties? No one knows.

This becomes even more astonishing when one understands that the typical crop life span of a plot of land that has been slashed and burned is only 2 or 3 years. This is because, in the parts of the Amazon that have not been biochared, most of the soil nutrient base is in the above ground biomass. Slashing and burning that biomass to ash sends most of the nutrient resources into the air as smoke. What little nutrients are left in the ash get quickly used up by farming and/or leached away by intense Amazonian downpours. However, converting that biomass into charcoal only consumes about 50% of the biomass (smoke) while the remaining 50% (charcoal) gets buried in the ground where it will remain stable for many thousands of years, perhaps even tens of thousands of years. The life span of this material is one of the many things scientists are now trying to determine.

But that’s not the amazing part. Charcoal is incredibly porous. Apparently there is something about the combination of this porosity (many things in soil are porous) and the charcoal itself that creates an exceedingly fine habitat for countless beneficial microbes which set up housekeeping in the charcoal, converting crude organic matter into nutrient dense, readily available resources. There is something else about charcoal as a nutrient holding substrate that allows those nutrients to be doled out in an optimal, judicious way. Not even the intense rains of the Amazon can leach out nutrients once they’re locked up in biochar (or the intense watering of backyard gardeners?). However, plant roots and their accompanying mycorrhizae, mycelium and other soil micro fauna love this well aerated, carbon based, nutrient dense medium and flourish within it creating a veritable paradise of fertility.

That’s not the amazing part either. It turns out that burying charcoal in the ground sequesters CO2. In fact, it’s a “net negative” sequestration due to the fact that plants that are then planted into biochar enriched soil will grow faster and will pull even more CO2 out of the atmosphere in the process of photosynthesis.

What about the smoke given off by making charcoal - the other 50% of the biomass? Even with the smoke produced by making biochar it’s still a “net negative” form of sequestration because when a batch of biochar is buried in the soil, its benefits will sequester far more C02 than was generated by its smoke. Plus, it will last far longer than the time it takes for the sequestered biomass to be replaced. Additionally, if the next generation of biomass is turned into charcoal, then a compounding effect begins. It’s like rolling over CD’s to maximize gains on interest (so I’m told).

As interesting as this compounding of sequestration is, perhaps the most amazing aspect is that the gases (smoke) can be captured and converted into biofuels such as alcohol or diesel! It seems we can have our cake and eat it too. Before the advent of electricity, our great grandparents used kerosene as a lamp fuel. Kerosene was often distilled from the gases (smoke) created by the production of charcoal, which was used to fire wood burning stoves.

I spent several weeks in May of 2008 making biochar in my outdoor earthen horno, crushing it by hand and applying it to my garden. I’m not going to dress up the process - it was long, hot and dirty. It requires a large, outdoor, wood fired oven and a plentiful source of dry, preferably local, native wood. All of the char I made was derived from mesquite wood taken from my farm property. [At some point in the future I may describe the rather complicated process of making char, but for now I think most readers will want to purchase their own - coming up].

If the char is placed directly into the soil, depending on how fertile your soil is at the onset or how much you amend your soil with compost or mulch, it may take several years or more before the biochar becomes fully charged with nutrients. However, the process of charging your char can be greatly enhanced by mixing the char into fresh batches of compost - a good option for small gardens, rather labor intensive for large ones.

Although I’m a proponent of no-till framing and gardening (another article), because it only has to be done once, there is something to be said for tilling-in a one time application of compost/biochar mix.

Another option is to put your chickens to work, which works well for larger gardens. It’s what I did.

Here’s how to do it. Spread the appropriate amount of biochar across the garden area and rake it in (calculate capacity to a depth of 8” - coming up). Then spread a 4” layer of well aged compost/manure over top of that, then spread a thick layer of mulch (organic straw works well, old hay or leaves) over top of that. Plant your garden into that. The following winter let your chickens into the garden. This is when the magic happens. By the next spring the biochar will be well charged from the manure/compost/mulch/chicken regime and worked into the soil. But don’t think you’re done at that point. Do the manure/compost/mulch/chicken regime every year and over time your original application of biochar will become ever more charged and your garden will flourish even more.

I use this program not only for garden vegetables but also for forage crops I grow for the goats and bees.

Additionally, I use regionally available 3/4”- volcanic rock, which has many of the same attributes as biochar, plus a very nice profile of trace minerals which soil microbes love to utilize.

If you’re interested in using biochar you can buy untreated lump charcoal (made from hardwoods) used for barbecuing. It must be broken into 1/4-” pieces to maximize the surface area. If you have a big garden this could be quite expensive as it needs to be applied at a rate of about 2% to 9% of the volume of soil. Here’s the formula for biochar application: Calculate the square footage or square meters of your garden and convert that into square inches or centimeters and multiply by a depth of 8” (or the equivalent in metric) to come up with a cubic measurement. Using a 4% ratio… 4% of 8” x 100 sq. ft. = 115,200 cubic inches divided by 4% = 28,800 cubic inches divided by 1,728 = 16.6 cubic feet.

Cornell University is the leading institution in the U.S doing research into biochar and they recommend starting out with 2% and adding more later if needed. There is no hard information on the optimal amount. As of my last check, the highest known ratio in the Amazon was 9%. My guess is that the optimal amount needed will vary depending on your soil type, its p.h. and climatic conditions. In fact research is now being conducted to determine if biochar was used in other ancient civilizations in different ecosystems [it was, in North America]. Don’t use charcoal briquettes, they’re often treated with starting fuel and fillers that you don’t want in your garden.

Good news. Since I originally wrote that in 2008, the biochar industry has taken off. There are now numerous sources for buying biochar online, as well as numerous sources of kilns for making your own char, as well as equipment that can capture the gasses and turn them into fuels. This link will take you to the USBI page for all of these resources. Biochar is now sold by the bag, which in the US typically comes in a measurement of cubic feet or cubic yards. It’s a burgeoning cottage industry whose time has come.

Apparently due to my earlier positions within the American Bamboo Society and early articles about how fast-growing bamboo can sequester CO2 faster than other woody perennial, I found myself in one of the 87 seats at the virtual table of the world-wide International Biochar Initiative (IBI) in 2007. We submitted recommendation's that were used to compile a set of Sustainability Guidelines for biochar production, later drafted by IBI. The US now has its own organization.

Because much of the worlds farmland has succumbed to erosion and loss of fertility due to mindless modern farming practices, the positive implications for biochar are far reaching. The creation of what amounts to a permanently fertile soil will change agriculture as we know it. The addition of chemical fertilizers to the soil will no longer be needed. Even current organic farming practices that utilize gargantuan, fuel guzzling corporate sponsored machinery will become antiquated. The future is small, local, hand crafted and… it lies in your backyard. Seize it.