The Newfarm Forums

[sgbotsford]

One of the things I read recently of the slash and burn farming in many third world countries:

Instead of slash and burn they've been slash and turn to charcoal. The charcoal is then worked into the land. Charcoal, it turns out, has an amazing ability to hold on to nutrients in it's porous structure. But since it's mostly C it doesn't rot, although root action will gradually break it up.

I can't find any work down by RI on the use of charcoal in an organic farming system. It occurs to me that this has large potential both as a carbon sequestering technique, and as a way to reduce nutrient leaching.

Consider the following scenario:

Produce a crop of wheat.

Bale some of the straw. (Some you want to leave on the land for mulch, yes?)

Convert it to charcoal during the winter. The charcoal processes drives about half the carbon off in the form of alchohols and tars. These can be burned for heat, or with a large enough operation used as a feed stock for distilation.

In the spring distribute the charcoal to the field that gets tilled this year.

The charcoal process will lose most of the nitrogen (not much in straw), I don't think it will affect either potassium or phosphorus. These materials will remain in the carbon waiting for the next crop.

Would this work?

Is RI doing any researach on this?

Anyone have good plans for a charcoal maker?
_________________
Sherwood's Forests
Quality Trees for Central Alberta
RR 1, Site 2, Box 5
Warburg, Alberta
780 848 2548
email s.g.botsford@gmail.com but take out the first two dots.

[sevib]

Hi,

I have not made any experience with charcoal until now, but I think it is an interesting topic. If you want more infos about this topic, you should search google and wikipedia for "Terra preta", that is the name of human build kind of soil, that was build by charcoal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta