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  • From: Tripp Tibbetts <slowfoodguy@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] if there were a benefit to deforestation...
  • Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 20:13:24 -0800 (PST)

>From what I understand about terra preta, they are still fertile today,
>several hundred years later.  Biochar is based on the concept, and is (you
>probably know this) wood that has had its carbohydrates burned out, but
>still retains its carbonaceous lignin structure.  The charred remains act as
>a sort of liferaft for soil microorganisms, as well as a concentrated,
>though recalcitrant, organic carbon source, that persists in the soil for
>decades if not centuries.  Several contributors to this list have more
>expertise in this area than I do.
 
But apparently the terra preta are visible on satellite images in areas of
the Amazon where indigenous populations lived for thousands of years.  As you
know, tropical soils are notoriously thin from constant leaching, and
fertility is generally maintained in the forest biomass itself.  The biochar
they produced effectively overcame this limitation, but the tropical 
agroforestry systems they used to produce food were unrecognizable to
temperate-zone Europeans, who assumed (incorrectly) that the small plots of
annual crops they could see supported a tiny tribal populace.  They totally
overlooked the lion's share of the cultivated calories.
 
This discovery in the upper Amazon is on par with the Aztecs, Inca, Maya, and
Egyptians really, lending even more credence to the population estimates 
suggested in Toby's article.  Which in my opinion is well worth the read.
 
Hopefully if we discover another major civilization it won't be with logging
equipment.
 
Tripp



The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow.
-Chinese proverb
 

--- On Thu, 1/7/10, Lawrence F. London, Jr. <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net> wrote:


From: Lawrence F. London, Jr. <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] if there were a benefit to deforestation...
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Thursday, January 7, 2010, 2:59 AM


Tripp Tibbetts wrote:
> Lawrence, you are familiar with the terra preta in the Amazon, right?  Have
> you read Toby's article on indigenous agroforestry:

Yes, I am familiar with it but have not done much reading about it. So,
what is the essence of their farming system, what made it so
sustainable? I hear about this incredible depth of tilth, storage of
carbon and nutrients, to a depth of 6 feet or so. Is that very soil
still fertile and able to be efficiently cropped; has anyone tried that?

> http://patternliteracy.com/beyondwilderness.html

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http://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/all-our-
soil-problems-solved-you-bet/

All our soil problems solved. You bet.
by Gene Logsdon

Relax, fellow farmers and gardeners. From now on everything is going
to come up roses and sunshine. A magical and mysterious soil has been
discovered deep in the Amazon (roll of drums, please) that will
double and triple your yields and grow tomatoes as big as
basketballs. Not only that but this soil will sequester enough carbon
to keep us warm through the entire coming ice age. Lean your ear
close while I whisper to you the magic phrase. Shhhhh. Terra preta.
Dark earth. In the ancient cities of El Dorado days, it meant
salvation. For awhile.

And now you can have some for your very own garden.

I am sort of making fun of terra preta because of the money-mongers
who would like to make a fortune selling the stuff to gullible
Americans, but the story of this miracle soil really is amazing. Deep
in the South American rain forest area there really are deposits of a
mysterious soil as much as six feet deep in some places spread over
thousands of acres. That of itself might not be remarkable, but
anthropologists are almost certain that all of it, or at least most
of it, was created by human beings in the centuries before Columbus
blundered upon the American continent.

Actually there's nothing much magical about terra preta beyond the
fact that it was man-made. Archaeologists reason that it is the
burned, or charred municipal wastes of lost civilizations whose
populations numbered in the millions and who are now thought to have
been very advanced. The black, sometimes brown, soil was made by
burning food wastes, human and animal excrement, and a whole lot of
wood. It is full of broken pottery shards which lends credence to the
idea that it was originally municipal waste. Farmers who own deposits
of it today still grow good crops on it.

Deposits of terra preta stand in stark contrast to the normal rain
forest soil around them. The latter is shallow and of low fertility.
Evidently, far back in history, humans figured out how to supplant
these natural soils with terra preta, composting and burning their
own wastes to do it. In that way they were able to meet the food
demands of rising populations.

This magic soil is mostly charcoal, and scientists and entrepreneurs
are making a new version of it which they call bio-char. You can find
some for sale on the Internet. You can make your own by adding
activated charcoal to compost or potting soil. The charcoal does make
the soil more porous so that it will hold more nutrients and keep the
soil more stable. It also will sequester carbon if you don't subtract
all the carbon emission created by burning wood to make charcoal.
Soil scientists tell me not to get too excited about terra preta
because while it is much richer than the rain forest soils of the
Amazon region, our soils, especially our rich cornbelt soils, don't
need charcoal, or bio-char, at least not yet. In fact, the hot
temperatures necessary for making bio-char volatilizes all the
nitrogen out of it and so nitrogen fertilizer has to be added to it,
sort of like when you use wood ashes for fertilizer. It is really
more practical, soil scientists say, to make one's own terra preta by
composting organic wastes into humus in the usual way. Do it for ten
thousand years and you will end up with deposits of mysteriously rich
terra preta six feet deep.

So what happened to those marvelous farmers of the past who figured
out how to make soil that could support high human populations? Many
historians say it all ended because of the diseases that Spanish
explorers brought to the American continent. But that is disputed
because civilizations rose and fell several times before any
Europeans arrived. It seems more probably that population growth kept
outrunning the society's ability to make more terra preta fast enough
to keep up. The population crashed, then slowly increased again, with
a new civilization adding more terra preta before it too over-
populated, and that process repeating itself unto death do us part.

The Chinese with their careful utilization of all organic wastes were
able to sustain a very high population density for something like
forty centuries. But eventually they felt forced to make laws
limiting family size to one child.

Terra preta does lead to all kinds of speculation. Maybe we should
start char-burning our landfills to make fertilizer. Some municipal
waste burning is being tried to generate energy. Maybe in 15
centuries our mountains of trash will be rich deposits of terra preta
type soils. And all those humanoid creatures from other planets will
be poking through them and wondering how our lost civilization could
have been so smart as to create something so wonderfully fertile.





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