Impacts of Biochar Additions on Soil Microbial Processes and Nitrogen Cycling
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- čas přidán 4. 08. 2024
- Presented on September 1, 2010, by Kurt Spokas - USDA at ISTC's 2010 Biochar Symposium.
Download slides: hdl.handle.net/2142/107123 - Věda a technologie
I just realized this presentation was from 4 years ago, but is a 10 year old study. Is there a follow up study?
Fascinating note how chars can absorb the microbial signalling compounds necessary for colony growth. Perhaps this is why "charging" biochar prior to deployment is so critical. It needs time for the flora/fauna to inoculate.
Excellent presentation. I totally get, as a degreed chemist, the importance of analysis and intellectual rigor. But seeing as how indigenous Native Americans in this hemisphere created insanely fertile terra preta 10 get deep in some places over 1000 years, I think maybe that the last slide and the feeling you're left with is a little one-sided. I get what he said about immediate effects of biochar, but that's only if you don't treat it first! If you use a compost tea or other activation method, you won't have the immediate efficiency drop he described. The quote is right, don't destroy soil. Regardless of the catalysis opportunities of trace metals in pots and and other materials he used to describe the difference in terra preta and regular biochar, it's clear the long term effects are positive. But what is the alternative to biochar? Well, what Monsanto and farmers are doing now. And that means treating soil as a chemically treated substrate of growing rather than an ecosystem. He didn't even address that aspect. Where is the analysis that warns against continuing the present treatment of soils with unnatural designer chemicals? How is that better than biochar?
Great information. I will be looking forward to hearing more of your research.
very informative. one of the best presentations i have seen. thank you.
can i coin the term nanochar?
Excellent presentation. Could you consider an update please. Greetings from Germany 🇩🇪
What a great presentation. It is packed with so much knowledge. Thank you
Part of the permaculture ethic is to equitably distribute the abundance. One leg of the three legged stool. People, Planet, Profit without all three, it is not sustainable.
I agree, but that last slide hit me the wrong way. What's the long term effect of biochar? I'll tell you... a dozen foot thick insanely fertile land in N. And S. America which people built over thousands of years and is the mainstay of our Midwest breadbasket. Maybe I interpreted the last few slides the wrong way. But the Chemistry geek in me loved the Organic Chemistry and GC Mass Spec!
Wonderful
Video
Again, thank-you!
Fantastic lecture! Thank you for sharing!
I seriously read "Thank you for charing" at first...
@@AtheistAnarchoCommie 🤣
We must put the char in the ground to sequester carbon and improve farmland for next generations. Very important work. Thank you.
Did you watch the whole video? This guy is a jackass.
I would not include the condensates as part of biochar. For the purposes of soil building, the structure is too important to the process.
Do you know of what furnaces in making biochar recover green energy to heat air or water? Do you know what the many different commercial uses are for biochar that could as a result in an increase in farmer income from selling biomass or biochar?
The polarfurnace.com G-Class combustion efficiencies in the high nineties, less than 2 grams per hour of particulate emissions, it is amazingly efficient. Several people I know who own them commented that they were surprised at how little ash they clean out.
We get a reduction in waste, overall, too! Seeing as how ANY organic matter can be used, even kitchen/ restaurant scraps can be used! (i.e. cities without sources of scrap trees from storms)
Have you asked Organic Gardeners what they are experiencing by incorporating Inoculated Biochar in their gardens? Have you tested the food they are harvesting for toxic chemicals? Have you taken soil samples of their garden and compared it to soil nearby that has not been treated with Inoculated Biochar for toxic chemicals you found in your research in this video study?
Just trying to get you to think outside of the box and make advances in knowledge that can be economically dissected and dissimulated in plain English that farmers can use to make improvements in production and increase the profitability of their farms.
We have archaeological evidence of biochar amended soils that date back over 9,000 years. Before humans had developed written language, we were teaching one another to do this. Soils amended that long ago still outperform soils from nearby that were not amended with biochar. What sort of toxic chemicals are you thinking you might find?
does the porosity or surface area of the biochar increase or decrease base on the pyrolysis method? If so, what are the differences between the slow and fast pyrolysis methods?
I don't think the speed is as important as the temperature. The material must glow, in the absence of oxygen. That is how you know it is done. It loses half it's mass, clinks together and sounds almost like glass. If you smell or taste it there is no aroma of smoke or fire. The only sensation you should get in your mouth is like it is sucking the moisture out of your tissues, because good char will do that. The temperature band I have seen is 450-500 C, (approx. 850-925F)
@@tonysaladino1062
Charcoal( for barbecue not soil) is made Ata cold 3-500°c. Barbecue charcoal is finished for the garden/soil by recooking at 5-700°c .
Lower temperature leaves wood vinegar , tar, and too many lower temperature volatiles( the foul taste if you put food on too soon) . Theas residues coat the surface/ fill the voids of the pores reducing total surface area ( reducing over all effectiveness ,making a smaller hotel housing fewer microbiology).
@@daviddroescher I have always had great luck when using lump or natural charcoal for biochar. As long as the material is light, does not smell like creosote or smoke and clinks like glass when you bang pieces together, it will work well. I have not had the need to re-fire it. If it works for you though, keep doing it.
Every time they say "pyrolisis" I listen "paralisis" lol.
What is the water absorption rate of a cubic foot of biochar compared to a cubic foot of soil in Illinois? How does this effect soil erosion during a heavy rain storm? What effect does biochar have on soil compaction? Wouldn't a reduction in compaction in the soil increase crop yields? Have you interviewed farmers in Europe that are applying Inoculated Biochar to their farm and learning first hand what efforts they are experiencing feeding it to their animals and the effects on their soil on erosion and crop yield or watched videos on the internet of farmer interviews?
By weight, char absorbs six times it's own weight in water. Biochar at just one percent in the soil column (one metric ton per hectare) a little less than one ton for every two acres. If you add 1,000 pounds of char, it can hold three tons of water per acre before it is saturated. that's 6,000 pounds, a pint is a pound the world 'round so 6,000 pints is 3,000 quarts and 750 gallons per acre.
Hundreds of studies have been done on biochar and amazing results continue to be documented. Doubling of crop production, infiltration rates that are stellar, because remember, the char acts like a condensation nucleus in a raindrop, each particle of char becomes a hub of activity that eventually expresses itself as one of the many billions of small structures that ultimately get linked by large structures in healthy soil, like roots and fungal hyphae. You need both to have functioning soil ecosystems. Just like you need detritus or compost and degrading plant material and dead roots as well as liquid carbon exudate from living roots to have a healthy balance of microbes and fungal activity.
@@tonysaladino1062 HiTony,you appear to know the subject matter intimately so maybe you might answer a query for me.
A guy on another channel claims that ''any more than 20%'' biochar in the O horizon is detrimental to the activity of the microbes in said horizon.
My query is,(A) To your knowledge,is this a fact?
And (B) does 20% biochar in the O horizon seem like a lot?
He does speak of 'quality char',as opposed to...whatever else.
One demonstration I saw , a qt jar filled with charwas topped off with water from a 2nd qt jar. Ut took ½ the water in initial fill. Then over the corse of 3weeks all but ½cup was needed to keep the jar topped off.
In short 5% char 95%water filling the voids in the char._. Your 1³' of char should hold ~7-8ga water ≈ to the volume of said 1³'. Vs soil that depends on the soil. Some healthy soils will infiltrate at 9" +/ hr
Runoff from heavy rain is lack of infiltration. So yes char reduces Runoff by improving infiltration and holding capacity.
This is old data before the importance of pre charging the biochar became widely known
what is the main difference between charcoal and biochar?
Charcoal and biochar are generally produced by the same process: pyrolysis. The main difference is the feedstocks used to produce charcoal. Both can be made from animal waste and plants, but charcoal can have non-renewable feedstocks like peat or coal. While peat and coal are plant based products, they take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to form using Earth's pressure and temperature. Whereas just using agricultural plants like grasses or fast growing trees or agricultural wastes like nut shells and cornstover can take less than a year to only a few years to harvest and produce.
but did you activate your char.
I process my biochar for at least six weeks post retort. The vast majority of volitiles are long gone well before the material touches the Earth. My final "test" before I release my char to the environment is to place what I believe to be finished char, in a bin that has a baffle in the middle, add soil with active worms into one half, in the other side, I place the char. Finally I pull out the divider between the two sides, then wait 24 hours. If the worms seem to be happily invading the biochar, I feel that it is ready to be put into the field. Activation and maturity are my primary focus during the entire creation of my biochars.
@@tonysaladino1062 cool idea
I always put loads of soil precursors into my char, then a broad range of soil microbes. I have never found the char to get ready to be applied to soil in less than six weeks. I call that period Maturation...Remember, every handful of char, has fourteen acres of surface area, you can't colonize all that territory by stirring it up a few times.
@@tonysaladino1062 May I enquire what specifically you are referring to when you say ''soil precursor's?
The proof in the pudding, please show some corn in the crib,
It is nice to see that at least one person is investigating potentially negative consequences. I feel perfectly sound using it in my greenhouses, but covering the entire nation with it demands thorough rigorous analysis.
I can't help but add that carbon sequestration is the wrong reason for doing this. CO2 is not an incremental greenhouse gas at 400 ppm and above. Those of us who understand physics and absorption spectra have always known this. Our atmosphere needs more CO2, not less. Trying to reduce CO2 is genocidal. To that end, we need to be very careful about how much carbon gets sequestered. We may suffocate every form of plant life on the planet if we go too far, and biochar really does work, so there is the real danger that capitalism will inadvertently rape the planet *because* it works.
Have you tried biochar in farm , personally ?? and you saw growth??
They've been advertising for biochar too much recently and it makes me doubt. .. we know globalists own the medias and usually when they talk about too much about something , it makes me doubt ....
@@pace1869 Yes. It is a sort of secondary effect from burning rice fields. Some of the organic matter becomes pure carbon. That in turn holds a lot of moisture and nutrients in future years. It is cheap to replace with potash, too.
you might want to watch this video regarding CO2 level concentrations and at what range they are good for plant growth.
czcams.com/video/VJoijPh2i-A/video.htmlsi=Yvc7vbScKI5VP_yx
Activated carbon or home made carbon? Which is best?
Practice...even raw, basic char will work after being settled by bacterium.
You do not need activated carbon, what you make will do fine. The process of getting microbes to inhabit and thrive in the char is part art, part science. That is what I teach in my classes. greenteamacademy.com/biochar-tony-saladino/
Bio char affects soil ph?
Yes, biochar will increase soil pH. The increase will depend on how much buffering capacity the soil has.
@@4ISTC
Not the biochar itself, but what comes from the biochar: metal oxides
So, is biochar good or bad for our soil?
Short/medium term good, long term we don't know.
@@DanielHJeffery Yup, we do, excavations in Amazonia already proved that the best soil in the region was in waste dumps where blood, bones, feces, ash and char were placed... that char still exists despite natural high decomposition rate in rain forests. Best results of biochar are on sandy soils with poor fertility. Once added to the soil biochar becomes absorption film (both minerals and water) but biochar alone won't make all that much difference if there are no other fertilizers. For clay-based soils and organically rich soils biochar has it's drawbacks (temporary) but doesn't hurt much either (depends on crop type). Tomatoes push a Like button every time they see biochar :)
"Good" or "Bad" depends on the starting soil quality and biochar feedstock and production method. For example, in our recent study (www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653519306770?dgcid=rss_sd_all) we found that biochar had no effect on the high quality Illinois farming soils. However, others have seen biochar improve soil quality in areas that have poor soils. In fact, the indigenous people of the amazon rain forest were modifying the poor soil quality over 2000 years ago with a biochar like product. These modified soils are called terra preta. For feedstocks, plants can take up heavy metals and other contaminants. Biochar production does not remove these contaminants, which can leach into soils when biochar is added. For production, lower temperature biochar production methods can produce PAHs, a known carcinogen. PAHs can leach into soils and be taken up by plants.
@@4ISTC
"For production, lower temperature biochar production methods can produce PAHs, a known carcinogen. PAHs can leach into soils and be taken up by plants."
What low temperature means? If i make char in an open flame and douse it with water to extinguish, will it be unsafe to use for my garden?
@@kistuszek Our 2014 study of PAHs on biochar found that PAHs could be leached from biochars made at 450 C (842 F) and 550 C (1022 F) but not from 750 C (1382 F). (hdl.handle.net/2142/72653) We cannot make a recommendation as to whether your biochar is safe or not. However, we do recommend that you have your biochar tested by a professional lab, so that you can make an informed decision as to whether or not you want to add biochar to your garden.
The best definition for Biochar I have seen is Charcoal that has been innoculated with biology. IE living Char.
It is too bad, you didn't figure out how to bake stuff to make char, it is just low or no oxygen which I have used everything from a cookie tin thrown in a fire to a TLUD in a 55 gallon drum. I tried to use the oven once but that was a smokey mess. :)
I don't understand how inhibiting N2 could be good.
N2 isn't absorbed by plants.
@@seano8927 thats correct, N2 to N4, nitrogen. And only then is available.
What am i missing.?
@@donTeo136 Usually you apply say ammonia or NH3, then it gets converted to nitrates NO3 by bacteria that the plants can absorb. Plants can't utilize N2. Therefore if it gets converted to N2 (nitrogen gas) you basically lost the nitrogen you applied as to goes back to the atmosphere.
Show me the results on video and not just talk. All I hear is talk and no results.
This guy is working against us.
What special feedstock did the Amazonian and South American use?. What lab? What institute did they turn to? To much scientific hype for charred carbon. It's charred carbon. Natural by far is better. Earth has done this itself for millions of years. Char if made from natural untreated chemical free carbon stock is char. People are looking for fire to pour gas on to make you think it's necessary. I make char in 50 gallon drum from whatever nature drops and scientist put out at the curb for me to pick up. My char is better than theirs. Char is charred carbon folks.