Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

There is money in them there hills Ken. There are people selling special horticultural bio- char mostly infused with fish emulsion. It seems that to have any results at all the charcoal needs to be composted with urine and fish emulsion for a year. Urine and fish emulsion will have at least as good an effect on their own.

Others are selling charcoal makers.

And yes they are on an ego trip as are so many others propagating new and exciting theories. Unfortunately there is a general rule in all this.

The graver the problems the more stupid the solutions that people start believing as gospel. I am absolutely certain that this bio-char hype is one more nail being hammered in the coffin of our planet's life system. But people don't like doing nothing, I mean one of my great peeves is that people spend fortunes and a mass of energy to maintain immaculate lawns, the only reason for their existence being that they are status symbols to show the rest of the world how wasteful they can afford to be with land. All the work being done to these lawns is all a waste of time and energy but try to make people stop with weekly lawn mowing.... Making charcoal is something like that I think, it is a throwback to some primitive former state to do with burning and having fire.

john

I have a running battle with the BioChar Association.  They said we added it to the soil and got increased yields.  I told them they might have spit on it and gotten increased yields. I told them to compare a biochar plot to an organic, no-till plot and we which yields the best.  They will not do that.  They are on an ego trip.  I asked them what is the difference in burning the crop residue on the filed and hauling the residue to a place and burning it there.  We have worked for decades to teach farmers not to burn their fields and now the experts say burn the crop residue.

Ken H

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