| Charred Biomass: Agriculture's Black Gold |
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| Written by Erika Fredrickson | |
| Friday, 18 April 2008 | |
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“Black gold” makes me think of the Beverly Hillbillies -- you know, as in Jed Clampett and “Texas Tea.” But we're not talking oil, of course. The “black gold” of agriculture is actually a sustainable technology called "biochar" -- a charcoal derived from biomass that improves soil fertility and may help mitigate climate change. This stuff is well established having been used at least fifteen hundred years ago by farmers in the central Amazon basin. Their charcoal was derived from animal bone and tree bark and the basin today still contains some of the richest soil in the world. That's because the biochar is inert, and unlike manure and compost which breaks down pretty easily, it persists for thousands of years, in a pretty permanent fashion. It increases water retention, microbial activity and the mineral uptake of plants. And the process? Not as intensive as you might think. It's a heating process known as pyrolysis where organic residue is packed into a metal container, sealed, and heated to the charcoal point. As a climate change mitigator, biochar may not have a monstrous effect, but it is more likely to stay in the ground than a forest which might eventually get chopped down. It also appears to decrease emissions of nitrous oxide and methane, two major greenhouse gases. In one study, nitrous oxide emissions were reduced by 80% and methane emissions were suppressed completely when biochar was added to a forage grass stand. Source: Treehugger.com, Science Daily, Environmental Science & Technology |
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