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  • From: christopher nesbitt <christopher.nesbitt@mmrfbz.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Beetle Kill and Biochar-- Fwd: USDA Invests inResearch to Convert Beetle-Killed Trees into Renewable Energy
  • Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2013 21:15:37 -0600

Alberts book is brilliant. It is well researched, informative and funny, in
parts. I hate to see Albert Bates get trash talked, even in a passive
aggressive way like this, attacking his motives. Albert is an exceptional
human, a great teacher, and a very kind man. He has also done a lot of
research on biochar and soil biota. I also see that making an ad hominem
attack on Albert and his motives is easier for you than to debate the
contents of his writing, which, since you have not claimed to have read, I am
going to go out on a limb and say that, in point of fact you have not read.
That, alone, weakens your argument, at least to me. Refute what he has
written, chapter, verse, page and paragraph, and maybe, just maybe, you might
convince me. Other wise it appears to me you are just another mouthy under
informed malcontent who is too lazy to refute what someone wrote and can only
argue against the person who wrote it and their motives.

Maybe you have read a lot more than me, and maybe you have done
experimentation with biochar as much as I have. Sure. Why not? I am not a
blanket biochar fan boy enthusiast, anyway, and think that making biochar to
make biochar makes little sense, but I have been working with biochar for the
last few years fairly extensively in conjunction with clean burning stoves
for cooking, and I have had outstanding results in tree crops in leached and
damaged tropical soils with high clay content with biochar inoculated with
compost. Making biochar while cooking? Its hard for me to see the down side
of this.

Your mileage may vary.

Let me step back and give you some context and anecdotal, first hand,
information:
On our farm, which has over 24 acres of managed land, most of which is
devoted to tree crops and perennial crops, with over 600 species of plants,
we have a lot of trees. Much of this land was citrus and cattle, 25 years
ago, when I bought it. It was heavily damaged. We have repaired much of the
soil using analogs to natural successional plant communities that would
regenerate primary rainforest if we were not here using human centric species
for food, fiber, medicinals and marketable crops. We have very specific plant
guilds we use to take pasture and make it forest. That is a whole other topic
that I have no time to address, but it is important for context of why we
have tried biochar.

We are constantly thinning out trees, cleaning up trees that have reached
senescence, or dealing with branches the trees have shed. I spend an hour or
two a day walking around in the shade of trees I planted, looking for fallen
food, fuel, fodder for my pigs, opportunities for intercropping and observing
what the farm is doing. Cleaning up the fuel wood from the floor of the
agroforestry system reduces the fuel load in our dry season (in 2008 we
suffered a run away fire that severely damaged most of our non cultivated
areas. The farm, itself, was unaffected). We have an abundance of fuel wood.
Where we live and work, %97 of the people cook with fuel wood. That is
because propane is expensive, and wood is free. We burn wood in a cook stove,
a few different rocket stoves, a cob oven (Saturday night is always pizza
night) and a few locally made biochar stove.

Most people here use open fires, "hearths", and many Maya women suffer from
eye disorders and from respiratory problems as they age. We managed a water
project with Ministry of Health, collecting data and sampling water from the
hand pumps in the communities for fecal contaminants and looked for ways to
avoid ass to mouth diseases. that was mostly pumping water from springs some
distance from the communities. A women centered set of pulmonary and eye
illnesses tied to fuel wood was observed in every community. Clean burning
stoves are a way to minimize pulmonary and ocular diseases. We have spent
some time working with people to address that issue.

Where people burn wood to cook, as we do, they release carbon into the
atmosphere. I designed a series of small biochar stoves, specifically
designed to cook food and using the gasses generated by pyrolisis to be
burned to cook the food. These were made from recycled materials, old propane
tanks and old 55 gallon drums, which are abundant on most of the planet.
These stoves are cleaner burning than traditional Maya fire hearths. The
primary product in this is the heat we are looking for for the purpose of
cooking the food we eat (and for the food we cook for our pigs). The
secondary product is the left over carbon in the pyrolisis chamber. We mostly
use rice hulls and cahune palm seeds or small diameter fuel wood. What we
have done in this scenario is use biomass for fuel, like most people do
outside of rich industrialized nations, to cook. So far, so good, right? Par
for the course. Use biomass to cook food.

Now, where we branch from the familiar is that we are using pyrolisis for
part of our cooking. We have two chambers, one external, oxygen rich, and onr
internal, for pyrolitic combustion. When we are in pyrolitic mode, there is
no oxygen in the pyrolisis chamber. The heated biomass off gasses methane,
hydrogen, oxygen and other gasses, which are very hot and also very
flammable. As these gasses exit the oxygen depleted environment to the
external, oxygen rich, combustion chamber, they are converted into flame.
This heat, again, is used for cooking. In this scenario there are less carbon
emissions, especially once the pyrolisis chamber is depleted of oxygen. The
byproduct of making this heat is the left over carbon that off gassed all its
flammable gasses from the pyrolisis chamber.

We like to use rice hulls, which we get from the village rice mill. They have
a small mountain of it. The carbonized biomass left over from the biochar
process has a high surface area to core mass ratio, and on a microscopic
level, the rice hulls are full of pores. Instead of burning off the carbon
into the environment, we are able to add that carbon to the compost we make,
and then to the soil.

Last year we had the driest dry season in the 25 years I have farmed here.
Cacao trees that were 5 years old, three years old and one year old, died.
The trees we planted in the previous year, using a mixture of pyrolixzed rice
hulls and cahune seed, crushed, with compost from the piggery and chicken
pens, as well as other sources of biomass, did very well. Almost none of them
died. ALL of the test trees planted without biochar/compost died. The trees
are now 16 months old. They have all reached their first jorquette, the
horizontal branching of the cacao tree, leading to the desirable shape for
more surface area for the flowers that come from the branches and trunk.
Usually this takes up to three years to reach this stage. Worth mentioning is
that this cacao cultivar we have been planting is a very slow growing rare
relic Maya cultigen found off in the rainforest at several Maya sites. It has
been slow growing everywhere we have planted it, but in combination with the
biochar/compost, we are seeing incredible rates of growth,

Biochar, when inoculated and added to the soil, is teeming with life. All the
fungi and bacteria and nematodes and other microrganisms use the biochar like
a cross between a condo for microorganisms and a coral reef. Fungi move in.
Like a coral reef, biochar has a lot of edge effect. One gram of charcoal can
have many yards of surface area for the fungi and bacteria to colonize. Thats
massive edge effect! I think that the very active fungal communities in the
soil, radiating away from the compost and biochar retained soil moisture
longer in the soil than areas untreated with biochar and compost. That would
explain the low incidence of mortality in the targeted cacao trees and the
high mortality in the trees we planted without biochar and compost.

Anyway, I am probably not going to convince you, and you sound like you have
made up your mind enough to not bother reading a book that will challenge
your assumptions, so take what anecdotal evidence I put forth here anyway you
want. For what it is worth, I was a heavy biochar sceptic, too. I did not get
it. Alberts book was very well written, and his arguments were well
presented. It made me interested enough to try it. We have used biochar to
cook our food for the last two years, once or twice a week. The trials we
have done in the last two years on using biochar as a soil emendment, as
HABITAT for microorganisms, not as food for microorganisms, have convinced me
that biochar, as a bi-product to cooking, is a useful tool to have in your
permaculture tool kit. It is not THE answer, it is AN answer.

Your mileage may vary.

The article being discussed below talks about the risk of fire in a forest of
dead and standing beetle ravaged pine trees. We have some pine forest in
Belize that was ravaged by pine beetle, and the fires were pretty bad.
Converting the dead and standing wood into biochar while using the energy
for... something, seems like a good idea. When it burns in the wild, it just
burns, and does a lot of damage to the soil and leads to siltation and
destruction of riparian zones. It is not as bad an idea as it sounds, to you.

Lastly, here is an article about our experience with biochar:
http://permaculturenews.org/2012/06/06/maya-mountain-research-farm-update-pigs-and-biochar/




_____________________________
Christopher Nesbitt

Maya Mountain Research Farm
San Pedro Columbia, Toledo
PO 153 Punta Gorda Town, Toledo
BELIZE,
Central America

Country code 501-630-4386

www.mmrfbz.org
www.facebook.com/MayaMountainResearchFarm




On Nov 7, 2013, at 5:22 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

>
> Well, just maybe I have read a lot more about it than you Christopher for
> at
> least two decades. At least the latest from the ISIS institute confirms my
> own misgivings.
> And please, science should be about critical thinking and experimenting and
> I have done both, personally.
>
> The worse and more complex the problems become the more simplistic and
> often
> stupid the solutions proposed become. That seems to be the general rule.
> And
> I am sure Albert Bates will make more money out of this than I ever will.
> John
>
>> Again, John, you do not understand the science. Please read "The Biochar
>> Solution" by Albert Bates so you have any understanding. Right now you are
>> reactionary and clueless.
>>
>>
>> _____________________________
>> Christopher Nesbitt
>>
>> Maya Mountain Research Farm
>> San Pedro Columbia, Toledo
>> PO 153 Punta Gorda Town, Toledo
>> BELIZE,
>> Central America
>>
>> Country code 501-630-4386
>>
>> www.mmrfbz.org
>> www.facebook.com/MayaMountainResearchFarm
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 7, 2013, at 12:11 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
>>
>>> Lawrence you know what I think about "biochar". The name is a very good
>>> name
>>> to sell a product that is quite bad for the planet.
>>> Want to keep the planet cool? Then go for living trees and shrubs and all
>>> sorts of plants. You want to do something good for the soil then let
>>> residues rot in situ. That is food for living organisms. Bio-char is a
>>> dead
>>> substance whatever the name.
>>> John
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Lawrence London" <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
>>> To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2013 4:07 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Beetle Kill and Biochar-- Fwd: USDA Invests
>>> in
>>> Research to Convert Beetle-Killed Trees into Renewable Energy
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 8:18 PM, Amy Little <amylittle@hvc.rr.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Though not stated clearly... Cool Planet Energy Systems is BIOCHAR
>>>>> oriented
>>>>> company.....
>>>>>
>>>>> From: "USDA Office of Communications" <usda@public.govdelivery.com>
>>>>> To: jeffs@ncat.org
>>>>> Sent: Wednesday, November 6, 2013 1:04:01 PM
>>>>> Subject: USDA Invests in Research to Convert Beetle-Killed Trees into
>>>>> Renewable Energy
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That could be a lot of trees across the country utilizing losses from
>>>> ash
>>>> dieback, pine beetle and other sources. I remember the years when pine
>>>> beetle devastated
>>>> quite a large number of southern yellow pines and possibly other
>>>> varieties.
>>>> If the harvesting is done on tree farms, state and national parks lands,
>>>> federal land,
>>>> private sector tracts growing timber for paper or lumber products then
>>>> you
>>>> might have a lot of material to convert to biochar. The main issue is
>>>> getting the trees harvested and
>>>> transported to biochar production sites; who is going to pay for and do
>>>> this?
>>>>
>>>> Lawrence London
>>>> lfljvenaura@gmail.com
>>>> http://www.avantgeared.com
>>>> avantgeard@gmail.com
>>>> https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> http://www.ipermie.net
>>>> Avant Geared http://www.avantgeared.com
>>>> https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
>>>>
>>>
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>>> https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
>>
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>> http://www.ipermie.net
>> Avant Geared http://www.avantgeared.com
>> https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared





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