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  • From: Marty Kraft <martyk@allspecies.org>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Biochar Making Chamber
  • Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:28:17 -0500

Paul

I'm sold on no till organic gardening. I promote Ken's guidelines on the subject. I give talks trying to get people to no till garden. If all the gardens in the country went no till that would be significant. Since we started plowing we have put much carbon in the atmosphere. No till starts to reverse that.

My costs on making biochar are:
Looking like a Sisyphusian fool - old enough that i don't care.
$30 for the steel plus time and gas to the junk yard.
Chiropractor bills from lifting the damn thing out of the fire. None yet.
Cleaning up the mess i make.

Plus side"
Made a great new friend in Theo, a beginning gardener with a big heart
Putting some carbon away for a thousand years instead of 20
Learning about myself and others
Enjoying the whole thing and hope i'm doing no harm
Putting some high cec stuff in my beds

Marty

Sticks my yard doesn't get to digest.On 3/13/11 10:33 PM, Tradingpost wrote:
Not to beat a dead horse, but no one has shown the end cost of trying to
sequester enough carbon by biochar to keep CO2 below 350ppm to beat global
warming. $100 trillion or $10 quadrillion?

Seriously there are several mainstream solutions far more doable such as
cutting out 95% of the feedlot operations, or cutting fossil fuel use by 75%.

As for compost being shortterm sequestration, that's fine with me. Because if
all agriculture did it we'd still be out of the woods and continuous
composting would keep us there. But what I'm doing and advocating is not
composting. I'm burying green matter in growing soil. That's better..

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 3/14/2011 at 12:40 AM richard green wrote:

Ok your heating the house utilizing the escaping gas from the wood inside
the chamber while at the same time making charcoal. A win-win situation
because you had to heat your home anyways. I like the fact the charcoal
was made out of smaller branches and such which normally would not be used
in a fire place. It certainly Did look like it worked, I thought the holes
were a tad bitt larger than needed. I am not convinced that bio-char
increases crop production and have started my own tests to verify for
myself. I understand the reasoning behind sequestering of the carbon in a
stable form like charcoal. All organic matter when decomposing realeses
CO2, as much as I like compost its only a short term sequester of carbon.


Rick




Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:26:01 -0600
From: martyk@allspecies.org
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [Livingontheland] Biochar Making Chamber

Just put a biochar making chamber video on youtube. Shows Theo Bunch, Art
Institute student, welding it and me making first batch of charcoal. High
excitement, for me at least.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6a8TdyMIdA
Marty

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