Bio Char Bubble burst!

Bio char is described by various promoters as "a miracle" and to read these accounts you would think it was a silver bullet for all mankind's problems. Proff Tim Flannery was quoted in Pip Magazine as saying

 " Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity's environmental future. The biochar approach provides a uniquely powerful solution, for it allows us to address food security, the fuel crisis, and the climate problem, and all in an immensely practical manner" . The article was written by Albert Bates, author of "The biochar solution". I would like to research his links to mining. 

I had already posted poor results in my trial of bio char on face book, but Ozzie of the year Tim's words convinced me to re-do my experiments, using this time PREVIOUSLY activated bio char ( I soaked it in compost extract for 4 hours) as admonished to do by miffed  enthusiasts. I posted my photos showing again no appreciable difference in seedling size with bio char or without. Again, bio char lovers  were upset and one said 'you have to wait 2 years to see a difference'. Oh really? Thats hardly the miracle as described by Alby Bates who says to mix biochar through  compost "..and add in to your soil and watch your crops power" . We also hear about yield increases of up to 30 % . That surely means in the same season? No one mentioned a long waiting period. 

Don't like to quash enthusiasm, don't like to offend friends who love the idea of bio char, but it has never made sense to me to burn wood that could be chipped and made into wonderful water holding humus. Particulate matter (smoke) and carbon emissions are put into the air  to manufacture the bio char that is most commonly available round here. In fact most W.A. bio char  comes from our Jarrah forest having been sent to smelters as fuel, smelters such as Simcoa  Silicon smelter, the largest in the world.  It could never be justifiable,  this destruction of unique and endangered Jarrah forest  that miners buy so cheaply ( $11 a cubic meter) to burn and to then make even more money from selling the burnt wood as "bio" char to desperate farmers. So is there some enormous and reliable benefit to farmers to make this even a little understandable? Well no,  results  are unpredictable and sometimes  detrimental, never to mention problems of application of bio char in the wind. To quote a paper 

"Over the past decade, biochar soil management has seen a surge in activities related to both research and development (Lehmann and Joseph 2015; Ok et al. 2015). Even though our knowledge has considerably advanced, the effects of biochars on crop growth still appear unpredictable, with in some instances increasing while in others decreasing yield responses (Liu et al. 2013; Jeffery et al. 2015a). To a large extent, this is a result of widely varying biochar properties (Enders et al. 2012; Schimmelpfennig and Glaser 2012) as well as of variable soil properties and environmental plant requirements. Some biochars may increase crop yield, whereas others may decrease yield for reasons that are readily explainable using known responses of crops to for example altered pH or salt contents (Van Zwieten et al. 2010; Rajkovich et al. 2012) and short-term N limitation in N deficient soil (Clough et al. 2013). However, we also observe a distinct lack of mechanistic insight into how properties that are shared by many biochars affect plant growth." 
 The full article can be found here:  11104_2015_2658_Article-1..5

Worse than wasting good fungi food by burning wood, some folks are burning chook pooh  to make bio char! This is  outrageous use of the blue skies of our planet as a dump for things too toxic to leave in a heap on the ground. Broiler hen manure contains arsenic, would you believe?  Manure from factory farms is implicated in cancer clusters in schools nearby those farms in the U.S. Someone in Serpentine had a mountain of  meat bird  poo they had to get rid of and  rang me, offering to transport it to our farm. I asked if their birds  ate GM food  and if they were fed arsenic as is common in that industry. He didnt answer but swiftly hung up. I'll take that as a "yes".  

Bio char provides a ready way to greenwash the dumping of toxic waste mountains  into the air. 

" From a NSW govt website :
Slow pyrolysis utilises a kiln that is heated
externally to achieve temperatures of
between 400 and 6000°C. The biomass is
held at these temperatures for over 30
minutes. Slow pyrolysis yields two key
products, biochar and syn gas. The syn gas
is a high energy mixture of methane,
hydrogen and carbon monoxide which is
combusted to generate the heat required to
dry and pyrolyse the biomass, with surplus
gas being available to generate renewable
energy, such as electricity.
What can be used to make biochar?
y Forestry and crop residues
y Poultry litter wastes
y Animal feedlot wastes and some biosolids.." 

Oh great! Burning not only the mountains of broiler bird manure   but human waste too ? ?!!

In 2014 I went to a lot of soil conferences and kept my ears out about biochar. Dr Maarten Stapper said the benefits you see last only 2 years and are due to the ash factor,  but once that’s gone there is no ongoing benefit. I understand this is  in contrast to compost which introduces beneficial microbes to the soil which can stay around performing their eco services for thousands of years. 

Dr Christine Jones said into the microphone at Kojunup conference a year ago that the magical terra pretta was in fact magic because it was worm castings. She said there was a big trench at the back of the Mayan/ Inca villages and all the rubbish was thrown into it over centuries, and in the humid climate worms thrived amongst the weeds, branches, dead bodies, poo, wood ashes from the fire pits, rotten watermelon, broken pots, and more. Very stable humus resulted from raging earth worm populations. Their castings, as we all know (or maybe we don’t yet) give a lasting benefit to any plant . Dr Jones mentioned with disappointment the heaps of funding going towards bio char and said that in her opinion it is money wasted.

 At a later conference the wonderful Walter Jehne said that he himself had granted funding to a bio char project in Narrogin, (something like 7 million dollars) many years ago. They were going to generate electricity with syn gas by driving off the hydrocarbons under high heat and little oxygen and were last seen looking for a market for the medical grade charcoal ….unfortunately he didn’t describe the outcome of the project but was clearly disappointed  and was subsequently impatient with bio char enthusiasts statements veiled as questions . He didn’t encourage a questioner who was greatly excited about bio char. Dr Jehne responded that organic matter(OM), forerunner to humus, is a better option for farmers. Humus has more negatively charged micro sites for cation exchange, attracting positive ions like calcium, magnesium, zinc etc. He said O.M. is easy to get hold of with very little expense to the farmer and doesn’t add to that CO2 legacy load in the air causing all our climate and nutrition troubles. The Bio Char Bloke  argued the point saying that a bio char experiment was going on in Manjimup with dairy cows eating it.  The dairy farmer was reporting that he had a fantastic population of dung beetles taking the bio char down in the ground all year, had stopped using vet chemicals and purchased fertilizers, and everything was going great on his farm.

 I piped up and said the same  positive observations could be made on our organic farm :we also have dung beetles burying every bit of pooh emanating from every rear end at our place and we have not purchased lime or fertilizers nor needed a vet or drench in decades, have wonderful pasture growth on little rain. ....but we don’t use bio char. These wonderful outcomes in the Manjimup trial may be due to other things which have changed on the farm as this farmer  gets educated......may be he has dropped artificial fertilizer? 

Elaine Ingham is completely bored with bio char, says it is a lot of hype. Her team bought several bio chars and tested them and found them all completely ineffective at promoting plant growth, and they were all in fact highly toxic. She points out that humus has enormous surface areas for bacteria and the rest to hide and feed in, far more than charcoal.

 Even though Elaine completes the hat trick of my favorite soil  gurus  putting the wet blanket  on the fire ignited in many by bio char,  my friend Jeff  Nugent was using biochar and I was impressed with his garden.  So I did a little experiment: Several plants were potted up in soil in one pot and the same soil with bio char in another pot. I was disappointed to see no difference in the two, even 12 months later, and we had thoroughly mixed the charcoal in advance with urine as Jeff  recommended. Maybe Jeff was doing more than biochar for his garden?
Yes, charcoal has been used medically for centuries as a vermifuge, and a jar of it in the fridge or your compost toilet absorbs odours, but the good ol' BBQ can easily supply all your ash and charcoal needs for medical uses, and even enough for soap making needs, no worries. I think if anyone has wood waste a-plenty it  would be better for all of us if they were to  buy a HANSA chipper ( great machine!) than a pyrolysis machine. Chipping and composting  the wood in combination with manure from feed lots would make for far better rates of carbon sequestration and fertile soil regeneration.  They  could also grow shitake mushrooms or other forms of fungi. Those saddled with  huge amounts of thinnings from stumped eucalypts could sell them as  firewood, a more ecologically sound fuel than natural gas or coal generated electricity. 

 Last time I spent a couple of days researching on google and you tube for the answer to the question "Does Bio char work"? the net conclusion was "NOT OFTEN" . As for scientific trials showing the efficacy of bio char, I can leave that to a team of experts who have reviewed all the literature on biochar and concluded that there is a small net benefit to using bio char of about 10 %.  Would more benefit have been achieved by composting the starting ingredients? The jury is still out. The abstract of their meta analysis said this :

".... experimental results are variable and dependent on the experimental set-up, soil properties and conditions, while causative mechanisms are yet to be fully elucidated.....   You can delve right in to the review here. 
I rang APAL soil laboratories in South Australia and spoke to the scientist on duty. I asked whether it would be possible for a farmer to "cheat" a soil test for carbon, by mixing bio char into the sample. He said no, not with the standard Wakley Black soil test used, it only measures ORGANIC SOIL CARBON in the form of humus,humates, microfauna and humic acid. These living things and humic substances are the real soil carbon which holds on to water and minerals, and charcoal does nothing to lift levels. BTW, I have heard nothing from any bio char protaganists wanting to share their trial results with us. The challenge remains open. 
 Dont be sucked in, realize there is an economically  failing native timber industry looking desperately to justify its own existence and to make a buck, and there are miners ever eager to  increase their social licence in order to expand the scars they make on the land.  Beware the green washing . Pyrolysis machines apparently do not produce much smoke but they are very expensive and few and far between. Most of the "bio" char being shipped out from Simcoa in vast quantities is the burnt remains of our precious Jarrah forests . "Bio" char has brought our native animals closer to extinction.

So is charcoal a wonderful benefit to farmers, a climate change solution, " the single most important initiative for humanity's environmental future"?  ...... or is it, as this article reveals,    a green washed nightmare?  

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