Look for a place that sells bagged charcoal to grocery and sporting good stores. They might be importing large bags or semi-truckloads of charcoal from Mexico, and when it gets broken down to lumps for the consumer bags there will be pieces that might fall through the BBQ grill. Until recently, they gave these fines away to local ranchers to spread on their pastures. My neighbor visited the Mother Earth News Fair in Belton, and a vendor was selling a 5 gallon bucket of charcoal fines for over $50. At that point, he decided to give it a try. I have been making compost and have been using the fines for the last couple of years. The garden soil has really improved. Here is a photo I took this morning of our LaSoda Red Potato plants. (Below)
Regarding spraying, I don’t think charcoal pieces would work too well, but they could probably be dropped in a gap made by a chisel plow. My neighbor is spreading his by hand, and then using a cultivator/hiller to get it into the soil. His rows have irrigation pipes underneath them, and he is doing every other row to see what sort of difference it might make. I don’t know how much charcoal per acre is needed, but until today, I never seemed to have enough. When I walk my pasture, I take note of poor areas, and will take a front-end loader of compost/fines out there and broadcast it. I have another farmer neighbor who is growing everything organic, and he swears by compost tea.
Hi all , Its important that bio char is inoculated first before digging into the soil other wise it will suck out all the goodness from the soil first before it gives it back, and so the first season is usually a disaster unless its first loaded up and allowed to sit for a few months first before mixing into the land .
You might be interested in this company here in Australia , they have one of there machines just a few kilometres down the road from me at the moment , I am trying to see if they will allow us to have a closer look , but its on council works land so might be a no go .
http://www.esenergy.com.au/recent-news-media/charmaker-mpp20-road-trips
Dave
I have to agree and to disagree with some statements, hence i USE char as energy source 
I plant a tree, harvest it, uses the most of it, give back the nutrient ashes to the soil…
The tree, during its growing, will absorb the Co2 from the air, releases the O2, stores the C in it cells…
Using the Carbon , instead of fosil fuels…
What should i say more ? I disagree with sequestering, instead of using fosil fuels… grow your energy… use the Carbon for your energy needs…
Any way, i am always confused about the terminology “biochar”
Grow some tree’s and use them wise… all of it…
The name biochar is just a sailsman thing. Anything with bio or eco in the name sales for three times the price. I have seen biochar for the first time in a gardening center this year and it comes at a price of 30 eur (50$?) for a 18l bag. If l wuld sell the charcoal l make for my car at this price l wuld be a rich man:)
I just made a bach of biochar out of hay for a test and l must say it looks quite nice and it is realy fast to make
How long does it take to innoculate biochar? I have a 5 gallon bucket urinal in my shop that has been steeping all winter that I just put on my garden and got another one started. I have another 20 some gallons of new biochar that needs innoculating and I probably won’t have enough time in the compost piles before spreading in the garden for spring tilling. I also have a bag of 12-12-12 fertilizer that is brick solid in the bag that I was thinking of busting up in pieces and dissolving in water and letting the char soak it up. Is that cheating? Will that work?
I’m never too sure how long is long enough for loading the bio char up , but I tend to think that the longer the better .
I have seen a lot of Youtube video’s and a fair few of them mix the bio char with manure in a heaped pile and cover it with a tarp, with the occasional turn and 4 weeks later they are using it ,
Knowing how absorbent charcoal is anyway I guess it wouldn’t take that long to soak all the goodness up if you needed to use it quickly .
Dave
I cheated with my biochar. I started my raised garden beds with only compost and just mixed the biochar in. It really seemed to make a difference.
Good morning guys, in our experience this is what we do: we stomp and pulverized the biochar until its likee a powder, then we pour a “soup” we make with worm “liquor”, manure water, and rock powder (pulverized rocks). The capacity of BIOCHAR of absorbing ANYTHING is so high, that we yust leave it for about 2 hours, then we filter it and let it dry (this is what we call “activaded biochar”. When we plant we put a spoonfull of biochar in the hole, then compost and the plantule. This works incredibly good, its so good that when you pull out de plant, there is BIOCHAR stuck in the roots, its like a “slow-release” nutrient pill. I´ll try to upload pictures (have to find them first). No way, pictures are too big, I´ll have to convert them to a smaller format. But I´ll upload the links to my videos.
This is the next day after the burn.
Reactor working, notice the intensity of the gases, the steel barel is red hot.
Reactor working. We just lite it, and go to sleep, next day it´s cool and of (self extinguished), and biochar is DRY, once its pulverized it wil ABSORBE the “soup”.
Found this very interesting paper:
This may not be as efficient as some retorts, but then again, given the size, it may be more efficient in some respects.
Certainly it has advantages in terms of the volume of wood, and the size of wood / biomass that can be processed. This size of reactor is of a scale sufficient for practical soil amendment, and carbon sequestration.
Garry Tait, Manitoba
Shamely Geoff Moxham died last year in an accident at his farm takeing down an old tree. Life´s paradoxes. The problem with his type of kilns, is that they slave you for hours.
These videos makes me think that we are on the right road.
I have questions too about the ways in which charcoal is supposed to boost soil fertility, there seems to be poorly documented mechanisms for how this may happen. Improvement in physical soil structure could be one important mechanism, and various exchange and retention of nutrients could be another, also by simply providing habitat for soil organisms and micro organisms, micorrhizae being very influential in plant growth and health.
The other important question, I suggest perhaps more important, is what is the maximum amount of char that can be added to soil without negative effects.
Regardless if the soil fertility can be improved, char in soil effectively removes the carbon from the atmospheric cycle for thousands of years. As long as it’s not detrimental, I believe it stands as the only practical carbon sequestration technique. I don’t believe in the integrity of industrial CO2 liquefaction and deep storage, or other pie in the sky theories, too much like greenwashing, too easy for corporations to fabricate nice charts, and do profitable dealing in carbon credits. Also too technology dependent.
What we know as a certain fact is that char, once put in the soil, stays there. It can’t leak back catastrophically, or be practically removed, it will stay in place.
I believe we have a lot of carbon to recover from the atmosphere, probably on an emergency basis. Plants will take it up at a rate greater than any human industrial effort. Our steel smelting and other chemical processes that we find essential require many tons per person of carbon sequestration to offset and undo. I see no other way to be personally sure of doing something effective to undo the damage we are unleashing.
For that reason, I see a modified gasification system, which leaves the char primarily for sequestration, or other purposes as the best combination of the expertise of the members of this site. We all love energy, and if we can make our endless energy needs integral to a real solution, we might do good.
Just my thoughts,
Garry Tait, Manitoba
Garry
I find your very inspiring view. If I understand you
Work collectively to the development of a séquéstrateur of Carbon, generator of energy.
A tool for effective autonomy, accessible to all, to meet our energy needs without emitting greenhouse gas
A tool that we offer an alternative to our destructive consumption
I hope I have communicated clearly enough his thinking
excuse my bad English
Thierry ,Québec
Hi Thierry, thanks for your reply. Yes, you have understood correctly, and expressed yourself quite well.
I believe that for practical purposes, there is no other viable path forward, but to utilize the naturally collected solar energy, as it is abundant, and requires the minimum possible technology or impact on the environment.
Since this requires some sort of combustion process to access the hydrocarbons, I feel it is a natural fit to burn the clean part, and permanently remove the carbon, and better yet if it serves as a means to.improve soil.
I also feel there should be a way to receive carbon credits for the measurable carbon removed from the atmosphere, and as others have mentioned on this thread, potentially the char has impressive retail value.
Regards,
This is the article that Wesley Thoricatha (member of DOW) wrote in permaculture.org. He mentions it above in the beginig of this chat. I am posting it because it is of an undoubtfull help for understanding the magic of BIOCHAR. It did not copy the pictures.
BLACK MAGIC: THE SECRETS OF AMAZONIAN FERTILITY
OCTOBER 22, 2014 BY WESLEY THORICATHA & FILED UNDER FUNGI, SOIL BIOLOGY, SOIL COMPOSITION, SOIL REHABILITATION
The great Amazon rainforest.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Bones. Charcoal. Ash. Blood. Feces. Food waste. Pottery shards. Before I began my journey into permaculture and regenerative ecology, if you asked me why someone would gather and bury these things together, I would have guessed at some kind of disgusting voodoo magic ritual. But for those initiated into the alchemy of composting and soil generation, this is actually a recipe for the most nutrient-dense, hyper-fertile soil on the planet — terra preta, or “black earth”.
The story of how terra preta was used by ancient amazonian peoples, rediscovered in modern times, and how it subsequently revolutionized our concept of the Amazon jungle and inhabitants, is a fascinating one, and it carries many lessons for us in modern times as we learn how to “leave no trace” (or even better, leave a regenerative trace) and develop a sustainable lifestyle and culture.
Dr. Etelvino Novotny studies tera preta in Brazil.
Image courtesy of Underwoodgardens.com
The Amazon: pristine wilderness or vast food forest?
First, a little history lesson. When the amazonian jungle was first discovered by colonial europeans and studied in the west, it was thought of as a vast, untamed wilderness of untouched old growth forest with sparse populations of primitive human inhabitants. While accounts of the first spanish conquistadors in the Amazon spoke of vast advanced civilizations in the jungle, no future expeditions into its depths ever found these thriving communities. This lead to the myth of El Dorado, the hidden city of gold, which has been largely dismissed and thought of as a fairytale.
This perspective continued into the 20th century, and was reinforced by the findings of anthropologists and ecologists who tried to harness the apparent fertility of the Amazon to grow crops. What they found was that the forest soil was mostly quite bad for agriculture, leading one prominent archaeologist to call the Amazon a “counterfeit paradise” that couldn’t sustain a population of any size. But many new findings are turning this theory on its head, and it turns out they were about as right as someone showing up to the playa after Burning Man and finding it improbable that 60,000 people were there.
The dark, rich soil known as terra preta is shown on the left,
compared to natural forest soil on the right.
Image courtesy of Carbon-terra.eu
Rediscovering an ancient art
Scientists and researchers started to look into the local accounts of terra preta, the black earth that existed in vast pockets throughout the landscape. This soil is dark, rich, and incredibly good for growing plants, and often extends more than 5 feet deep into the ground with countless layers of stratification evidencing hundreds or thousands of years of accumulation. These treasure troves of fertile soil are obviously human-made because they include all of the ingredients listed above, including organic waste and pottery shards. But the craziest part is that there is so much of it: Some estimate that 10% of the surface of the Amazon is covered by it, which is twice the size of Great Britain. That’s a whole lotta humans creating a whole lotta humus.
Besides understanding the alchemy of composting and using it to their advantage, the native peoples of the Amazon also knew how to leave an even bigger awesome trace. It is thought by many now that the great diversity of food-bearing plants and trees that are found in pockets throughout the Amazon were created by the humans living there for millennia. While I’m sure none of them thought of it in the way that we do now, they were creating food forests, simply by harnessing the fertile earth that their ancestors left them and growing what they wanted to eat. More and more it is looking like the Amazon has been shaped way more by humans than we ever previously thought. Leaving an astoundingly massive legacy of fertile soil and food forests is what every permaculture nerd and practitioner dreams about at night, and these new revelations about the Amazon show us that not only is it possible, but we have done it before.
The real magicians: microorganisms and char
To take you into a brief biology lesson, let’s talk for a moment about what makes terra preta and composting in general work. To put it simply — it’s the microbes. Bacteria, fungi, nematodes, worms, insects, and larger creatures all play a part, but the bacteria and fungi are the all-stars of turning organic waste into nutrient-rich soil. They feed on decaying stuff and make available nutrients that plants crave.
But microorganisms have needs, too — they like a nice habitat just like us, and that is where carbon comes in. Much of the carbon in terra preta comes from the charred wood of ancient cooking fires. It is what gives the soil its black appearance, and it turns out to be the perfect microorganism hangout. Carbon in the char form has an insane amount of surface area — a single gram of it has a surface area equal to something between a tennis court and a football field. And in addition to being a great habitat, it does a bunch of other amazing things for soils, such as retaining texture, holding water, and making nutrients more accessible. It is the combination of diverse organic waste and large amounts of carbon that native Amazonians used that allowed the microorganisms to make the black magic of terra preta over thousands of years.
Biochar, or charred organic matter such as burned wood,
has an incredible amount of surface area.
Image courtesy of Carbolea.ul.ie
Modern implications
The most direct lesson we can learn from terra preta is something that is oft-repeated at permaculture design courses, that waste is just an unused input. Or as William McDonough of the Cradle to Cradle design philosophy succinctly puts it, waste = food. While we have access to infinitely more resources, technology, and knowledge than native people did, we seem to have completely lost their wisdom that planning for future generations and living in a way that causes the environment to flourish takes precedence over, well, just about anything else. When we allow our waste to become floating islands of trash or worse, and when we utilize an agriculture that strips the land of its fertility instead of restoring it, our future can only be bleak.
But on a more personal and practical note, how can we be the change that we want to see and harness the lessons of terra preta? The first thing is to look at all of the waste you produce from the things you consume, and see how you can reduce, reuse, and recycle as much as you can. If you have access to land and an interest in gardening, then learn all about composting and start to play around with it. It is a wonderful way to make your own rich soil. And to utilize the wisdom of how carbon can really launch soils to the next level, either buy or start to make your own biochar. Let the microbes do their work and make them happy — that will give you great soil and great soil will let you grow yummy food that is healthy and delicious and not shipped from another continent.
It may seem like the environmental problems we face are enormous and our personal impact is small, but as terra preta shows us, human impact on the environment can be positive, and even better than if the environment was left alone. We created the problems we face and we can fix them. And it all starts with a respect for natural cycles and implementing what we know one step at a time.
Good video to start a debate; its focus (I think) is more comercial dew to the sponsors, so thats his focus. I have another. Let´s see what comes up with the debate.
Interesting information. My impression is that he describes fertility increases in only certain types of soil, and some increases in volatilization of organic matter in soil.
It seems that the char is largely inert, though appears to provide increased habitat for soil micro organisms. I have observed that poor northern forest soils will grow outstanding trees, but when cleared are agriculturally unproductive. I believe their fertility must be due to the symbiosis of forest soil organisms and the root systems of the native trees. Char in soil could enhance this trait, but perhaps only under certain conditions.
For the claims made, I haven’t seen undeniable proof that char is as beneficial as claimed. From my perspective though, I am encouraged that it seems to cause no significant harm up to very high concentrations, and may often be of some benefit.
Regards,
I walked back yesterday to my charcoal cone retort and noticed some greener patches of grass around it as I was coming near it. A closer look showed that in places where I spilled char as I unloaded it last fall the new shoots of grass were standing up three times as tall and had a much lusher and greener color than surrounding grass away from any charcoal. Could it be that the small pieces of charcoal being black heated more by the sun gave the plants the extra boost or did it attract and hold extra nutrients and moisture over the winter to give the grass an early boost? Whatever it was, I like the results.
Hi Don, where I grew up, we burnt road sides,and hay fields in the fall. Those areas were always first to green up, and were thicker than where it wasn’t burnt. Never knew why just knew it worked. Al