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  • From: Holger Hieronimi <holger@tierramor.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Carbon farming as solution to climate change?
  • Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:58:00 -0500

Hola-

thank you, Darren, Rain, Mich and all the others for this valuable info

Your recent posts on this topic clarified a lot - looks like more than just an introductory course on Carbon Farming to me

I will have to get through this info with time - and have to see what we can apply in our work with local campesinos
seems that we have to downscale this a little bit...most of the people I´m workin with, have access to much smaller pieces of land (2 to 7 ha.)

During the last five years we told people to add charcoral to their (bocashi-)compost.
Sebastiao Piñedo sais in his courses with campesinos, that charcoral works like a "battery"...sounds funny, but it makes no sense to explain complex issues on soil microbiology in too scientific language. We have to invent another language for this contexts...

Question: Is there any spanish info available on Carbon Farming ???

Thanks also to the owners and operators of this list, in the current information storm, most of the posts that I receive are really valuable adds to my practice as PC desiner and teacher.

saludos

Holger Hieronimi



El 13:59, Darren Doherty escribió:
G'day, We are working with a couple of companies....one is a San
Francisco-based BioChar/Solar Power VC (that I met with last year) and one
of their partners here in Australia who have developed a char mineral
complex that low temperature chars stuff like chicken manure (yes from
industrial chicken factories), municipal woody waste and clays to make a
pretty amazing product that according to much of the analysis done so far in
field testing does a great job of increasing CEC, water holding and
biological activity very quickly in all soil types including the sands of
the grain belt in Western Australia. So yes I think that this material has
great potential but then so does harvesting sunlight, air and water in a
great process called photosynthesis and using it to restore carbon (via root
exudates and the soil food web) into even very sandy soils and using this as
the extensive soil amendment therapy before we hit the input button, whether
its soil inversion subsoiler plows that bring clays to the surface in duplex
soils (ie with sand over clay) or biochar or anything else brought in from
outside of the site. The local developers assure me that the full life cycle
analysis of this product on this is on the money, though I have yet to see
the this in print as such.

At a product level its very good, though again my Permaculture emergy and
Keyline 'Sun:Air:Water' strings as the only ideal inputs are always pulled
when working with any external input. Get over it but get over it mindful of
the greater potential especially where this example of GreenTech is also
able to generate electricity and hot water and water itself (capture of the
water coming from the char process) and is using materials that are
available locally abundant and are otherwise polluting (ie chicken wastes),
excess to quarrying and mass prunings of municipalities. Certainly any kind
of GreenTech is easy to take pot shots at from a Permaculture perspective,
though in my opinion at the R&D level this only serves to negate potentials
to innovate and develop ready alternatives to the status quo of urban food
production, distribution and resource depletion. Of course we would love to
see that urban sprawl over farming land stops and that everyone produces as
much as they can for themselves, but there is always going to be a place in
the division of services for concentrated food production of different
scales in urban areas.

I have recently designed a R&D farm for this company where we integrated the
char facility with 2400m2 of hothouses. Separated by only 20 metres these
two facilities work together quite well and are a great example of the
design process we in PC know as 'Random Assembly' and inspired a lot by the
works of Dr. George Chan and Will Allen. So taking that excess hot water we
then use it to heat water tanks for tropical aquaculture production, from
which we then use the water from the fish tanks to go to irrigate a
aquaponic vegetable system inspired by Will Allen's 'Growing Power' system
of soil hydroponics (as opposed to the typical soil-less systems), where the
water from the fish tanks is fertigated via either drip or spray irrigation
over veges grown in pots filled with compost and this char mineral complex
and then this water goes back to the fish tanks or is used to irrigate field
crops that are a feedstock for the fish systems after having gone through a
system of adjacent wetlands prior to being used for irrigation of the field
crops. The production figures and cash flow from this system is pretty
amazing and we already have checked in with a local food distribution
aggregator who would take whatever we have and distribute it within an hour
of the system.

Again on the broader question of Carbon Farming the use of the Permaculture
Ethics and Principles come into clear play as do, in my opinion, the
Holistic Management 'Testing Decisions'. When we apply these parameters to
some of Allan Yeomans (and others) ideas on a nuclear:organically farmed
biofuels paradise with no need to reduce our 'standard of living' such that
its more or less the same with no limits to growth etc. (as William
McDonough states is only a limited by design and its expression in design
abundance etc.) then they are probably looking pretty shaky, particularly
when it comes to Nuclear energy (assuming Allan is correct in saying it
actually relatively safe and that we could use subduction zones to dispose
of the relatively small volume of high level waste) as it has to be massive,
and centralised in control. Clearly that model of anything is not getting us
anywhere and has to be a focal point of change.

Localised biofuel production has demonstrated potential as does localised
pyrolysis energy production with its outputs of electricity, syngas (wood
gas), industrially refined products, hot water and char using the feedstock
of local waste streams and perpetual coppice and return of char to the local
agricultural systems. Vandana Shiva's 'Soil not Oil' speaks well to the
potential of the explosion of the non-localised, greenwashed model of these
systems and how important it is to be as localised as possible to which I
would ally my view.

Enough for now: gotta work to pay for the car to get to work to pay for
house and the land and blah blah blah...

All the best,

Darren



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