Terra Preta Soils to Save the Biosphere

erich · Tar Sands Joined: Aug 14, 2005 Posts: 57

The integrated energy strategy offered by Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.

I feel we should push for this Terra Preta Soils CO2 sequestration strategy as not only a global warming remedy for the first world, but to solve fertilization and transport issues for the third world. This information needs to be shared with all the state programs.

The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:

These are processes where you can have your Bio-fuel and fertility too.

'Terra Preta' soils I feel has great possibilities to revolutionize sustainable agriculture into a major CO2 sequestration strategy.
I thought, I first read about these soils in " Botany of Desire " or "Guns,Germs,&Steel" but I could not find reference to them. I finely found the reference in "1491", but I did not realize their potential .

Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/442624a.html

Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehm...r_home.htm

This Earth Science Forum thread on these soil contains further links ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-preta.html

The Georgia Inst. of Technology page:
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/dday.pdf

There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.

Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.

Also, Terra Preta was on the Agenda at this years world Soil Science Conference !
http://crops.confex.com/crops/wc2006/te...P16274.HTM

Here is a great article that high lights this pyrolysis process , ( http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.

Soil erosion, energy scarcity, excess greenhouse gas all answered through regenerative carbon management http://www.newfarm.org/columns/research_paul/2006/0106/charcoal.shtml

.
If pre Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.

We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

I feel Terra Preta soil technology is the greatest of Ironies since Tobacco.
That is: an invention of pre-Columbian American culture, destroyed by western disease, may well be the savior of industrial western society. As inversely Tobacco, over time has gotten back at same society by killing many times over the entire pre-Columbian population.

Erich

Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar@aol.com
(540) 289-9750

Ludi

I don't believe in "this is the only solution" solutions, personally. But if this works for you, that's great.

Erich, How many acres do you have currently under this form of cultivation?

Do any of those articles contain a "how to" for the farmer, or can you post a brief primer yourself? Thanks.
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kjmclark · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 09, 2005 Posts: 318

You know, we tried putting charcoal in a few of our garden plots this year. I bought about a hundred pounds of cheap charcoal briquets, soaked them till they broke down to a slurry, and put them in our garden plots. We also did a soil test and discovered that sulphate of potash would help immensely. We did both, so I can't say which made what difference, but the plots with the charcoal were *extremely* productive this year.

The best example was our green pepper plot. We haven't been able to grow green peppers worth a darn, since we're in Michigan, with a relatively short summer growing season. Also, our soil is glacial till with a pH of around 7.8. Our pepper plants this year were more like 4.5' tall bushes than the 1.5' scraggly things we usually get. We harvested about a bushel and a half of peppers off those five plants (hard to know, since our kids were out there every day eating them like apples!) I think I'll work in more charcoal next season!

bart

Thanks for the links, Erich.

If I remember correctly, the Loma Preta techniques were supposed to be much more effective for soils in the tropics, as opposed to temperate climates.

I think that Loma Preta and soil ecology in general are perhaps the most important things on which to do research.

Bart

erich · Tar Sands Joined: Aug 14, 2005 Posts: 57

Hi All:

Ludi:

1 "I don't believe in "this is the only solution" solutions,"
I agree.... but of all the solutions I've seen, short of a silver bullet like Fusion or Nano-tech Solar/Thermo-electric, This integrated energy strategy offered by Terra Preta Soil technology may provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, A wholistic approach make winners out of all the many parties involved.

2 "under this form of cultivation? "

None yet, been searching for bulk sources,
I just started checking on the availability of Agricultural grade charcoal, ( dust to 1/2 inch,
high lignin feed stock, 4%- 7% moisture, and the lower the cook temperature the better.)
I can only find it in Missouri, a 22 ton trailer , delivered to me in Harrisonburg, Virginia, @ $225/ton. In Missouri @ $125/ton

Kingsford Charcoal, may occasionally at their retorts in West VA , over produce for their bricket manufacture use and may have loads available.

A.M. Leonard , a landscape supplier has 50 lb bags for $70

The Best small scale supply is the grommet "Natural Charcoals", no binders, chemicals, or coal, you do have to grind it up.

The low cook tempts ( 400-700 F) I understand to be important because what is not completely pyrolysised helps the microorganisms populate the small spaces in the char

Brickets are cooked 1500 F

Orchid growers use 20% char in the medium for Lady slippers

Bart: "more effective for soils in the tropics,"

Yes .......because of rainfall and growth rates, but the results of the work in Georgia and japan show the same tripling of yields after three years.

I am a landscape design/builder, with other interest in Bio-fuels. I found this Terra Preta work a few months ago and have been posting it around to science forums, local academics, soil science people, local farmers, and authors of relevant news stories.

bart

Erich & others interested in soils....

Consider writing an article for "The Permaculture Activist" or Energy Bulletin (energybulletin.net). No pay, but it helps to get the word out.

I wrote an article on Soil Ecology for the Autumn 06 issue of the Permaculture Activist which I will be posting soon on Energy Bulletin.

Bart
editors AT energybulletin DOT net

Frank

Very interesting - thanks for the links.

Ludi

I guess I can try to learn how to make charcoal. Used to be an industry around here about 100 years ago.
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buffy · Tar Sands Joined: Nov 24, 2004 Posts: 42

The yahoo group on organic gardening I'm on had a huge discussion on this. I will see if they have any of the info. stored. I am planning on using the trees that we are clearing off my 14 acres to make charcoal. I need to do some research on the exact process. Thanks for the links!!! I have lots of reading to do!

erich · Tar Sands Joined: Aug 14, 2005 Posts: 57

WOW.............This is the first I've seen of a pyrolysis process like Dr. Danny Day's on the market:

http://www.bestenergies.com/companies/bestpyrolysis.html

erich · Tar Sands Joined: Aug 14, 2005 Posts: 57

I spoke with the author of a Terra Preta (TP) story in Solar Today, Ron Larson ,
http://www.solartoday.org/2006/nov_d...CornerND06.pdf
he said he spoke with a major National Geographic editor, who is preparing a big article on TP. but Doesn't know when it will be out.

Also:
In E. O. Wilson's "The Future of Life" he opens the book with a letter to Thoreau updating him on our current understanding of the nature of the ecology of the soils at Walden Pond.

" These arthropods are the giants of the microcosm (if you will allow me to continue what has turned into a short lecture). Creatures their size are present in dozens-hundreds, if an ant or termite colony is presents. But these are comparatively trivial numbers. If you focus down by a power of ten in size, enough to pick out animals barely visible to the naked eye, the numbers jump to thousands. Nematode and enchytraied pot worms, mites, springtails, pauropods, diplurans, symphylans, and tardigrades seethe in the underground. Scattered out on a white ground cloth, each crawling speck becomes a full-blown animal. Together they are far more striking and divers in appearance than snakes, mice, sparrows, and all the other vertebrates hereabouts combined. Their home is a labyrinth of miniature caves and walls of rotting vegetable debris cross-strung with ten yards of fungal threads. And they are just the surface of the fauna and flora at our feet. Keep going, keep magnifying until the eye penetrates microscopic water films on grains of sand, and there you will find ten billion bacteria in a thimbleful of soil and frass. You will have reached the energy base of the decomposer world as we understand it 150 years after you sojourn in Walden Woods."

Certainly there remains much work to just characterize all the estimated 1000 species of microbes found in a pinch of soil, and Wilson concludes at the end of the prolog that
"Now it is up to us to summon a more encompassing wisdom."

I wonder what the soil biome was REALLY like before the cutting and charcoaling of the virgin east coast forest, my guess is that now we see a severely diminished community, and that only very recent Ag practices like no-till have helped to rebuild it.

I found this study in this TP forum :http://forums.hypography.com/earth-s...-preta-26.html

First-ever estimate of total bacteria on earth
http://www.sdearthtimes.com/et0998/et0998s8.html

erich · Tar Sands Joined: Aug 14, 2005 Posts: 57

I am a landscape design/builder in the Shenandoah Valley. I found the Terra Preta work a few months ago and have been posting it around to science forums, local academics, soil science people, local farmers, and authors of relevant news stories.

I was an early adaptor of mycorrhiza inoculants , Hydro-gels , and over the years supported composting operations of local poultry/dairy farmers and of composted bio-solids of the local waste treatment plant.

The old saw of "Feeding the soil and not the plants" is so intrinsic of TP I had to get onboard. Actually it's more like " Feeding , housing, and water & sewage system for the Soil not the plants"

My research focus is now on Bio-Fuel and carbon sequestration issues for sustainable agriculture incorporating carbon-negative, closed-loop pyrolysis systems. However this work has lead to nanomaterial research in energy production.
Both Nano-Solar PV, Solar H2 production, and Bioreactor H2 production. Another area of interest are new quantum tunneling chip designs for direct conversion of heat to electricity.

Man Must Master the Carbon Cycle:

Man has been controlling the carbon cycle , and there for the weather, since the invention of agriculture, all be it was as unintentional, as our current airliner contrails are in affecting global dimming. This unintentional warm stability in climate , has over 10,000 years, allowed us to develop to the point that now we know what we did and that now we are over doing it.

The prehistoric and historic records gives a logical thrust for soil carbon sequestration.
I wonder what the soil biome carbon concentration was REALLY like before the cutting and charcoaling of the virgin east coast forest, my guess is that now we see a severely diminished community, and that only very recent Ag practices like no-till have started helped to rebuild it. It makes implementing Terra Preta soil technology like an act of penitence, returning misplaced carbon.

http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input/CCC2006/Energy%20Paper%2006_05.htm

This is a prescription from Dr. Danny Day at GIT, for what we can do to promote Terra Preta Soil Technology:

" A global Manhattan project of
climate change.
What can you do? Read up on terra preta (some of the published works
made a part of the above patent application), look at references in
the Eprida website or convince yourself by testing. Grow your favorite
plant in two pots, one with 1/3 wood charcoal (soak this in fertilizer
for several days), 1/3 sand and 1/3 available soil. Plant the other
with your normal method for potting plants. Fertilize and watch them
grow. Watch it for three seasons and note the differences. (Many have
noted their best results in the second year as microbial populations
increase) Alternately, use a microbe/fungi inoculation to speed the
response.

Then tell everyone you know.Even if we can't stop avoid the climate
shift we will begun to build an awareness of a solution. If we broaden
the understanding that we can produce carbon negative fuels, scrub
fossil fuel exhaust of pollutants and C02, reverse the effect of
mining our soil, depleting soil carbon, trace minerals and losing
agricultural productivity then we will effect many generations to
come. In our lifetime, a 2000-year-old secret is being reborn and its
timeliness could never have been more appropriate. It now up to this
generation to embrace a plan to work with nature to restore lost soil
carbon and rebuild the incredible life at work in our soils. Working
together, we can achieve the possible."

Erich J. Knight

Doly · Expert Joined: Dec 03, 2004 Posts: 4034

This is all very interesting, but there was a very knowledgeable poster that used to say that all the biological methods of carbon sequestration go too slowly to get rid of the enormous amounts of carbon we are putting in the atmosphere.

nero

Doly I agree, replicating the processes indians and primitive peoples use would be too slow but we could learn from them and do things on an industrial scale.

If we were to harness an industrial process to create charcoal. we might start making a serious amount of charcoal. If there was such a demand for charcoal that it made sense to turn lignite coals into an artifical charcoal we might have a whole new industry where coal gasification plants has two revenue outputs: syn gas and charcoal for terra preta. This might make economic sense for some coals that have a low heating value. It would also likely improve the mass and energy balance requirements for coal gasification, (no need for all that extra oxygen for the partial oxidation of the carbon carbon bonds)

As a carbon sequestration technique that wouldn't be any good since we would just be moving some carbon from deep under ground to soil level. For serious carbon sequestration we would have to be charcoaling some fast growing biomass. That brings us back to the issue of all biomass energy technologies. Having to concentrate a dispersed energy resource to effectively transform it into the high value product we want.
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Biofuels: The "What else we got to burn?" answer to peak oil.

erich · Tar Sands Joined: Aug 14, 2005 Posts: 57

I have not seen any thing about coal being a feedstock for bio-char.
The remaining lignin structure of Low temperature woody charcoal (not grass or high cellulose) has an
interior layer of bio-oil condensates that microbes consume and is
equal to glucose in its effect on microbial growth (Christoph Steiner,
EACU 2004).
High temp char loses this layer and does not promote soil
fertility very well. Tests by Finnish researcher Janna Pitkien, on
highly porous materials like zeolite, activated carbon and charcoal
show that microbial growth is substantially improved with charcoal

On the Scale of CO2 remediation:

From Duane Pendergast; Carbon Cycle section

"Finally, and perhaps of most importance to us, we come to the carbon cycle on land. Details on the fate of the 120 billion tonnes of carbon absorbed annually from the atmosphere by plants (GPP – Gross Primary Production) are of interest. Half of this (autotrophic respiration - 60 billion tonnes carbon) is almost immediately used by the plants themselves as food, returning carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That leaves 60 billion tonnes (NPP – Net Primary Production) to be incorporated in their leaves, stems, roots, fruits and seeds. Some 55 billion tonnes carbon content is co-opted by animals – of many sorts - and ultimately returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (heterotrophic respiration). Some 4 billion tonnes is consumed by combustion. That leaves about 1 billion tonnes to be incorporated into soil or dissolved in water and washed down rivers to the ocean.

Humans directly control and manage a major part of earth’s vegetation and animal life through agriculture. We also influence the carbon cycle through our use of forests. This review of the carbon cycle thus raises some questions. Are IPCC figures and data subtly downplaying the role of human influence on the carbon cycle? Is human use of fossil fuels overemphasized as the source of the problem? Are humans involved in other major activities which influence the carbon cycle and composition of the atmosphere? Is it possible that some aspects of the carbon cycle, other than fossil fuel use, could be modified to play an important role in greenhouse gas management?"

http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input/CCC2006/Energy%20Paper%2006_05.htm

It is my understanding, and please correct me if I've got these figures wrong, That atmospheric CO2 stands at 379 PPM, to stabilize the climate we need to reduce it to 350 PPM by the removal of 230 Billion tons.

Since man controls 24 billion tons in his agriculture then it seems we have plenty to work with in sequestering our fossil fuel co2 emissions with Biomass as charcoal.

As Dr. Lehmann at Cornell points out, "Closed-Loop Pyrolysis systems such as Day's are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative". and that " a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions! "
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biochar_home.htm