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Now that I've shown you how to make it. I want to talk a little bit about why to make
it. I'll tell you a little bit about my personal story cause that's most of what I've got to
share. I'm just a farmer who decided to focus on biochar because I saw the opportunity and
I wanted to share it with other people. So on my little farm up in Massachusetts I started
clearing land and I quit my job and said I'm gonna grow stuff instead cause I hated my
9 to 5 and I quickly found that I was sitting on a big sandbar which is what Cape Cod is
where I live. Its sand and rocks and sand and pebbles left behind by the sheets of ice
that came down in the last Ice age. So I quickly started trying to figure out how to turn that
sand into usable soil and stumbled across biochar in a book called 1491 which is a story
of the history of North and South America before the Europeans got here and started
messing with it and in the little section in the back of the book is talked about these
Native Americans that lived along the Amazon that made this incredibly fertile soil to
the point where the scientists were going to study it because they couldn't figure how
they did it and I've actually traveled down there and seen it. It's called terra preta
which means black soil or dark soil and they also have terra mulata which is sort of outside
of the terra preta which is a dark soil that was also created for growing things and very
very obviously created on purpose by people. So you go and you stand in this field in the
Amazon basin which I always pictured the rain forest as being like the most fertile place
in the world and it's actually the opposite. It's forest because there's lots of water
and lots of sun but it's not fertile. It is solid clay. To get to the sites that we went
to you had to climb 30 feet of slippery solid clay. They had to puts stairs and steps and
boards across it just to walk across it. Solid thick clay. So this is what the people were
living on there and trying to grow things in and it must've taken them generations and
generations of figure it out but somehow they figured out that if you put charcoal and other
waste products and compost and so forth in the soil you're gonna get much better growth
out of your crops and they did it to the point where they spent thousands of years and generations
and generations and now it's piled up and still there. Some of it thousands of years
old has not washed away like all the other nutrients in the jungle. When you get this
clay base and you get all that rain in the rain forest, it just washes all the nutrients
away. We actually got a chance to walk back into the rain forest and they showed us. He'd
go in and take the leaves they'd pile up away and you'd see the roots of the trees are growing
up out of the ground because they're competing for whatever nutrients are falling out of
the forest. They're not growing down into it. It was is really bizarre to see but there's
all these roots coming up toward you if you sweep away the leaves and so forth so they're
going after that stuff as it's decaying faster the than it can even become soil but in the
spots where they've found the terra preta that they now understand is an old place where
there was a city of people living. Literally walking through this farmer's field you'd
reach down and grab a fistful of the soil and it"s black and rich and smells like most
wonderful soil you've ever seen and there's big chunks of pottery in it everywhere so
it's really obviously anthropogenic soil. At one point I said to the farmer, I said
wow that's a beautiful orange you've got there I mean this orange tree was very large and
the branches were so overloaded with fruit that they were touching the ground they couldn't
hold all the fruit and fruit were huge. I thought there were grapefruit at first and
he said no that's an orange tree and they were all dark green they weren't even ripe
yet and I said how long's that tree been there? Oh that one that's only two years old. Two
years old?! That's how good this soil is. So now they compete for that soil in Brazil
and other South American places they actually mine it for potting soil and sell it in the
cities. They talk about a growing back that you can actually take a layer of it off and
I believe what's happening there is that it is so rich and the stuff does grow on it so
much and it brings in so much biology and that is all decaying into it that it actually
promotes the building of the soil that you want. Even though you've already taken some
off of it does keep growing stuff so fast that then decays, that it does come back to
some degree. It's obviously not coming back as terra preta cause nobody's adding more
burnt carbon into it but it is promoting the buildup of the soil even though it's most
of it's gone what's underneath so I think that's where that legend is coming from because
it has actually been documented by scientists down there, that it is building the soil even
after they've harvested most of it. So I found out about that I started making it in little
cans on fires in my own my own yard as I was clearing my land I'd make char and I grow
these turnips that are ridiculous. That have been grown in Eastham Massachusetts for the
last 150 years and nobody really knows where they came from. I mean talk about legends
there's all sorts of ideas on who started these things but they're big turnips begin
with and they're worth a lot of money to me because it's a niche crop that is people go
crazy for them. No problem I can sell every giant turnip I can grow no matter how big
it is so when I tried the first time after reading this book, making a little charcoal
and putting it in a row with my turnips. The turnips doubled in size compared to the rows
where I hadn't done it and I thought whoa this is too good to be true and I tried it
on everything I could find and it helped pretty much everything on my farm, not everything.
There were cases where I did some damage and we'll talk about that too. Maybe John can
talk about that more. Things not to do with biochar that can cause problems especially
in the short term but by putting a strip into the the turnips you could see from hundreds
of yards away the difference in those plants. It looked like a different species of plant
and literally the ones that I put it on were twice as big as the ones that I hadn't put
it on but I've grown them 28 pounds one year 32 pounds one year. I mean the thing was the
size of a basketball and you look at it, this big ugly root and people think oh that's probably
all pithy and no good to eat. I cut that thing up, I made over $100 on one turnip. What variety?
It's an Eastham turnip. I brought one with me. Now that turnip just you sat in the back
of my truck and rode here 1000 miles at a 60 mile-per-hour wind and that's a baby that's
not a full-grown. It'll be two or three times that big by the time I harvest them and the
leaves are very good to eat to, even when they're that big. The bigger they are the
sweeter they are. No I went out in the field and just grabbed one and stuck it in a bucket
to take to the symposium so that's been a week at the symposium under the fluorescent
lights I thought it was dead and then Pat stuck in the greenhouse now it's fine but
it's an amazing plant that will grow after it's been buried in the snow the snow will
melt off and they'll go back to growing and that will turn into a 7 foot cedar in the
spring all covered with beautiful yellow flowers all of which are also edible that I found
out from one of my chef friends. That's the same as most of the ones in my fields up North
which are, they're probably growing faster up there cause they like the cold weather
than it would down here but as soon as we get a frost we'll start harvesting now yeah
but you can't harvest until you get a frost cause it really changes the flavor.
So that's how I got into biochar once I realized what it was doing for my soil I then went
online and thought I wonder if anyone else is doing this and of course there's a whole
international community of people doing this through to the IBI which is the organization
that did those posters out there is the big one that I recommend if you want to learn
more. So my Name is John Nilsson and I am with Chargrow.
Chargrow is a newly formed LLC here in Mills River based out of stuff me and Bob were already
doing. I put this up here earlier because if you haven't seen this video it's pretty
neat it's a BBC video It's a little dramatic, It's you know starts out like duhn duhn duhn
duhn you know you get into it but in the search for El Dorado they do talk about selling the
soil .They do talk about how they didn't do slash and burn in those days they did slash
and char. They were smarter than us and Thomas Mann totally through the work in his book
1491 through the work of archaeologists you can see that he's basically totally rewriting
US history because it's the history of US prior to Columbus and it's really good because
they were managing land on a very large scale here so the whole thing that we've been taught
when I was a kid anyway is oh there's just a few native tribes and they we're just over
on the outskirts here. No there were really high populations of people managing really
big acres of land so even the whole conservation ethic to get it back to this special place
this eden. The eden that the first white folks got to was being managed you know so it's
pretty interesting stuff and I have all another piece about that but I first wanted to get
everybody on the same page with the search for El Dorado terra preta. That's showing
you what native people were doing in both North and South America prior to colonization
and what was interesting about those folks. They were feeding a huge amount of people.
The first Spaniards that it came up the Amazon said the agriculture was on par with anything
they'd seen in Europe and the buildings touched each other for 14 miles on both sides of the
river and as far as they could see in we're settlements so it was a very very high population
and they had to grow a lot of food and they did not have steel and they did not have domesticated
animals so you could imagine how tough their agriculture was. It was all by hand in the
only edge they had was superior soil fertility methods and that's how I first got into it.
Pat's probably not around yet but Pat was one of the first people that said hey they
do this thing you know and they put the charcoal the soil and the first thing I said was yeah
that's gonna fly. How could you afford to make the charcoal? That's just skip it. Another
guy mentioned it and I don't know who told me next but they said hey there's this guy
at the University of Georgia and he's making power while he's making the char and that's
when I went okay I'm in and you know so I went down there and learned from him what
they were doing. That was a company called Aprita. I don't know where they are these
days, they've kind of imploded but they were getting to this thing while wait is second
if we can if we can make some profit at this thing and use the energy now I might be able
to go to the back and go hey maybe this is good for agriculture. Concurrently at the
time I come from the compost industry and I'm a consultant in that and what I was working
on is how do you get the biology into the growing medium most efficiently as possible
so their I was making potting soil with compost where the potting soil contained about 40%
by volume compost and I could even make it so it could suppress damping off which is
a common rhizoctonia disease in greenhouses and I was like wow this is gonna be great
like I can do this but we were selling our potting soil in little bags to white flower
farms in Connecticut and there were using it for growing all these bulbs and everybody
loved it. The project lasted one year and then they canceled everything and we were
like, well I thought you liked this stuff. Yeah we did like it. Well what was the problem.
They didn't keep track of their, it's a mail-order business and they didn't keep track of their
postage till the end of the season and our product weighted two to three times more so
the cost of shipping they had the same price on the shipping totally killed the project
and somebody probably got fired and so I realized well while I can't deliver this biology very
far maybe 50 miles in a tractor-trailer in potting soil weights too much to go into conventional
markets. Well great idea it's not gonna fly and that potting soil still does sell and
a lot of organic growers will put up with a heavier weight potting soil but a conventional
grower won't. He's got machinery that, he's got flats that are all designed to very light
mixes. So how do you deliver the biology lighter and I played around calcined clay and expanded
shales and I had this one consulting job with these guys and they had played around with
carbon and I was like whoa this stuff is off the charts so from there I started helping
develop the original chargrow is a concentrate that is based on biochar carbon so it's basically
carbons, microbes, substrates and foods and with one of the people that I was consulting
for. Me and him went on to create a trade secret formula and we get uh when you put
it in about 3% by volume of a potting soil we get a 51% increase in tomato yield at first
pick so that was concurrently going on while I was hearing about aprita and I quickly thought
wow we've got to figure out how to make our own char or else it's still gonna be really
expensive and so that's what got me into biochar and then all the applications like Bob and
I quickly I was like look this works. Where do you get the thing that makes it and what
scale and can it go into agriculture and around and around and around on that and that's what
led me to where I am here today. No soil becomes terra preta just because you added char. Okay
so when we we're at the growers school this past spring, one of the guys who presented
got really into the char and he said aw man I put it in my soil and that was my worst
year ever and the reason why is char by itself is that charcoal filter it sucks up stuff
sucks up water, nutrients ,organisms so if you don't have a lot of stuff going on already
in the soil it can tie up stuff reduce yield the first year so it's like that charcoal
filter right. In your water filter maybe you have a Britta filter or something like that
and it's got all the char balls in there and the water is coming through and it's filtering
and after about a year they say throw out the filter that's cause the filter is now
loaded. Well in the field the little chunks of char are like the filter and they're gonna
suck up stuff. So if you want to stack the cards in your favor you want to load the filter,
your gonna load the char so now it holds the biology you want. That's why blending with
compost and things like that can get this so this will be releasing and the other thing
that's going on in that, you can think of the char as this, I always start with a golf
ball and the golf ball will have these little dips in it and if the char is made well, than
those little dips are cleaned out and now you got internal pore structure. You can have
a gram of char have the surface area of two tennis courts and that seems hard to believe
but it's all a internal pore structure and what that does for the soil is it holds whole
nutrient but not as important as holding the organisms that do not nutrient cycling process.
So when a plant is growing and there's sun light, photosynthate is made through photosynthesis
and carbohydrates and Sugars go into the leaves and into the roots and the plant puts it out
of the roots so the plants puting out simple sugars and carbohydrates out of its roots
continuously. It's doing that to feed the organisms. To get them on their infection
sites cause organisms through their hyphae and their enzymes can get nutrients that are
out in the soil that the plant can't get by itself so that's what going on and what char
does is it's a safe harbor for those organisms it's the super concentrate they can hatch
out even if things got bad out here like what could get bad? High salt fertilizers kill
the process so this bio-inoculent that I've made called chartgrow concentrate. It works
but you can kill it and so it's a great biological tool. We have chemical physical and now we
have biological tools that we can use and the char is key to that so the char by itself
doesn't do the trick, it's when it interacts with organisms and so the extra part of the
terra preta, what happened was here in the example of terra preta cultures what they
found was the natives had these large areas were they were adding the char to their feces.
Basically they had a waste management problem to with a lot of people in high concentration
so you'd have your manure piles 'humanure' and you could put the char over the top and
now it would help to sterilize things and get it to break down and so now there's more
people that have looked at that look at that and so by doing that method it led to the
char being loaded with nutrients which is what were doing in the soil amendments were
gonna make here and the surface of the char is oxidized and so you're changing the surface
chemistry and it can hold more and those two things together is what gets you the terra
preta so the terra preta didn't happen overnight is was loaded with manure and they now think
it took up to centuries to get it's full fertility but the thing is it doesn't stop it just keeps
building and so some of the scientist out there are going oh wow you know it's crazy
you can't add 100 tons per hectare. Well no you wouldn't want to you wouldn't be profitable
anymore right so but you can add a little bit at a time continually building your soil
over time and that's really how you get to this big benefit in fertility so I wanted
to bring that up. This group here. I'm trying to remember how he said it 'Ithaka' is what
he said. Hans-Peter Schmidt he was at the biochar conference that just happened up in
Massachusetts. He Skyped it in, he couldn't phone it in so he Skyped in his presentation
he did his Skype presentation and he showed all the applications and I think one of the
most interesting things here on the second page is the cascaded use so he is like please
like an agricultural R&D firm nonprofit figuring stuff out. I believe he said he was on some
lie 40 farms with with this and repeating and repeating what he was doing so he could
put it in the silage and then the silage is feed to the cow but he could also put in the
feed so it goes into the feed additive supplement then it's on the floor were the cows are walking
around as a liter additive. Then it can be after the manure comes out in slurry, throw
little more in there so all the things he's doing are taken it through the food system
through the cow even. It's sucking up nutrients, it's changing that surface chemistry making
it more and more loaded and then even water treatment and fish farming so I wanted to
put this out there and this is on the Living Web Farms website but I wanted to put this
out there so you could start to see that there so many applications and in bioremediation
char is actually gonna disrupt the market in that traditionally they've use either compost
and it breaks down to easy or they've used activated carbon which is really expensive
and now we have a cheaper form. In remediation one of the things will be a new road or they'll
be a runoff problem and they'll do his thing. This is side view and this thing is just a
tube with some material that's filled with char and a little bit of compost so the water
runs off, hits that and it's constantly being filtered, cleaned as a goes and then this
has a little bit of compost in it so pretty soon it's the berm and you got a continuous
living water filter so to me that fits in the properties of biochar. In other words,
add it to the soil, permanent sequestration of the carbon that's there, doing a function
an ecological function. Here it's filtering water. Out the field it can grow crops more
effectively and I even think cheaper. That's one of things I hope to do more of as a go
down the road. So we've heard of the terra preta South America. There's an American version
also so I talked about Thomas Mann rewriting American history so this was something I wrote
up for some of my friends around Thanksgiving and the first page it talks about cation exchange
capacity and I'll explain some of that but then the second page is a letter I was sending
around. The first Europeans to come to the US were amazed by these new wild lands and
the type of soil in the grasslands in the middle of the US. There's a picture in their,
all this brown area are these grassland soils well what they found these grassland soils
had in common was that they were very fertile and so that some of the same folks that did
some of the testing on the terra preta decide hey let's look at these soils in the US and
there called Mollisol. Thats just the soil scientist name for it so what they've learned
about that these Mollisoils is that presettlement fires so prior to colonization they know that
presettlement fires produce charcoal okay and that charcoal was much more abundant in
these soils than they previously thought. Fires were a common practice that Native Americans
used to maintain grasslands. If you have a grassland you're gonna have more things that
eat grass out their. Buffalo, elk . That kind of thing so they were doing that to maintain
grasslands okay when I worked in Kansas for Kansas Crop Improvement Association which
is a group of seed producers. I'd be driving home at night and I could see on the horizon
a line of red and that was a whole town was out there burning the prairie they were still
doing it and the reason why they do that is it maintains a grassland for grazing and it
kill the *** species so that the fire goes across the prairie and just burns the tops
of the grass but any shrub that sitting in their it burns the wood and it chars down
into the ground and with buffalo and everybody else out there some of that's getting spread
out so Native Americans were doing this on a big scale I don't know if you can still
do it today but certainly when I was in Kansas they were still doing it. These scientists
came and they studied it and I go okay what is this? so the biochar accounted for 40 to
50% of the organic carbon of this mollisoil so of the one that's the most common in the
grasslands and then the quote a friend and I really like is but essentially the entire
contribution of organic matter to the soils cation exchange capacity could be attributed
to the cation exchange capacity of the char okay so what that's saying is pretty much
all the cation exchange capacity of these soils comes from biochar so now what's cation
exchange capacity? It's the ability the soil to hold positively charged cations, positively
charged nutrients so soils in the South you know a lot of them cation exchange capacity
is four. The guy that was at the growers school who had that really terrible year, the next
year his cation exchange capacity from a small amount of char went to eight. That's really
hard to do. It's really hard to get cation exchange capacity to move at all with just
compost yet double okay so you can think of it as like a bank vault right and its nutrients
sitting in their. Depending on how big it is, you can't stuff any more nutrients in
so you can't hold any more nutrients that would be non leachable but still root available
but as the cation exchange capacity gets bigger the box gets bigger the vault gets bigger
you can hold more fertility. That's how they did it that's how they did in the South American
land so you're building cation exchange capacity so what this paper went on to say is basically
that pretty much all the fertility of these soils right so the first colonist comes here
and it's this amazing garden of Eden and the populations of animals are over the charts
well the main predator of the animals is gone. 90% of the population of the US crashed just
like in South America TRANSCRIPTION IN PROGRESS what happens was the first Spaniards brought
the diseases of domesticated animals and other diseases that they had built up resistance
to but the natives did not they crashed the population of people who are taking care lander
gone and all his fertility sit there and now we have actual proof that the fertility of
the note of breadbasket of the US of the picture my mind the US breadbasket of the US columns
from this charcoal so oh basically the fertility just like in the terror Prater was the biochar
added prior to colonization so that was the real wealth of this country and the call is
happily get the government were many people are out anymore pretty nice so that the resources
that Islam a bonded instable char residues in soil implications for soil fertility and
carbon sequestration much different authors all will will put this up on the site to Seattle
Om is a pretty technical paper and I just want to extrapolate it down to what I could
easily get and use I'm a soil scientist molecular why can't do something with her right away
than it this on reading the Sunday morning on so let me take this another step so Exchange
capacity again that grower had a four in any energy year to he was up to an eight he was
thrilled to eat as couldn't believe it okay so Sandy soils what colored sandy soil which
we had a lot of it here as a Exchange capacity of 3 to 5 okay when you start getting up into
real good loamy soils like up in New England and in some of the some of the soils deposited
from the glaciers are nice dark soils you could get up maybe 1015 NL they did have some
of that in the Midwest but they really mind it down a lot of them aren't very good even
California in olden the big Valley there a lot of them are much lower than that on but
in Amazon soils the found soils that were that I and so that's off the charts so what
this says and the reason why as a soil scientist I gets a window is because what this says
we can permanently change so fertility the charcoal they've dated it the half-life they
think is 1000 years so even if they're 50% or home that still thousand years of artillery
we can build now how do we make it is probable fossil is now this this rule has to go back
into the field house I can ago are you still make a lot of char that's portable or demonstrated
here you go to make a lot of chart it's got a work in the field well charbroil concentrate
works that that you put in the potting soil when you start your blog and see put in the
potting mix through transplant and what you're doing areas with little to char and a lot
of biology packed onto the chart your transplant the sexy picture of the poster out there the
transplant at the time a transplant but this is a normal one and this is the chart it might
be 25% figure flexible better you put that the field ~difference but then it flowering
of flowers earlier yields earlier and it can yield 51% that's that's pretty much were we
gotten to that was four years of replicated trials Virginia Tech's you can get there you
grow super transplants using charged as part of your biological mix and you can get a higher
yield at first they can than a beach picnic that dwindles down and you can make a decision
one day and you're picking the disease are or the market but so there you can do that
and one week we look at the nutrients we were doing that compared to conventional agriculture
we were doing at at about 50% less fertilizer required now are talking now or get the something
that can make people some money right away it's not easy though because you change your
way of thinking it's a biological tool so if you use high sulfur lies in on nuclear
could you tell the biology of the Charles still be there in the biology may be had to
mixture but you've killed your benefit so your your work away that when organic potting
soil you don't you'll want a lot high sulfur lies as little as fertilizers possibly actual
and you go to see automated translator is 60 weeks at the time of transplant you want
a starter so instead he is the high salt fertilizer use a low analysis something like a fish emulsion
could be put in okay now you got them in the ground may be got for negation or drip on
the trip again low-salt fertilizers low analysis and you will to carry that plan out now talking
a way that we can make agriculture more problem with so that's once I got the battles like
okay now rolling you know with that amount that's all and that's only in that the that
is about 3% so the document which contains char is in the potting solely 3% by volume
and then that when used correctly also at the time of transplant as a cover crop input
down so that's in as an extra energy boost for the microbes and with proper practices
you can get to a better yield at less cost so that's were while charred rubber meets
the road in terms of what he can do in agriculture Tom and so that that's why this the CEC thing
is so important just to to some measure of what the soul can hold so that got me really
going and then like a select while we were source scouring the planet where we can affine
where you find a machine that's good work I was negotiating with all these companies
and trying to get a free man's summaries got this summer got that and it was a lot like
my express in the compost business elite a lot of people talking about it lauding desktop
machines note on the page they look really good very view on the ground in the further
I got the less I found and so on I looked at that one out of University of Georgia and
I thought that was good to be great they they imploded a number of companies were doing
with cans by that's not good enough and and in my measure of what was good enough is that
I had had to get that profitable possible towards why can't make chart out using the
heat when I was a biochar from somebody else there's there's there's plenty char out there
not always a good quality but why would I do it well then I met Bob and I heard about
them and he had a little box thing is a and you probably write a happen yet and then and
then I found out all the issues me so he was taken the heat out of his metal box water
would be needed it came under a greenhouse in your unit to dry wood were in the new version
of that this is a would kill we can heat water and runs the standard vectors there's also
pipe in the ground we can keep the floor we had on the solar application the back of it
is song to come into the attic and when that one is enough songs to fail come all start
running heating so were really use the energy well here and we can take the energy of the
greenhouse to so now were were multitasking arch *** in a work getting it to do multiple
functions for us and so that was another piece I wanted and that that's where to demonstrate
your more more in the ideas we can take it out to more more people and show on that this
can be done on different scales we happen to be at this scale person I I've already
about one third the skill we started a little greenhouse would countdown them got bigger
but that's a reason real promise of biochar that you can we can do these things and and
make it profitable and start to yelp free task some of the stuff that people were thrown
away and one of the things I want to make make clear is there are there a lot of folks
that will say biochar this could cause us to cut down more trees or waste crop snow
white corn ethanol just to the corner biochar I really think so I say we got a lot of room
therefore will ever get to that every storm there's lots of waste I know guy up in no
Marilyn discovered Pogo every time is a big ice storm in the DC Baltimore area it's like
million dollars in seven days a minute just there's so much trees, downed his job is to
cut him take amendment put them on his place and trip him up and the so what on what I
believe in is that we don't even need to get into that debate about over the grow trees
to chop him down to make chart there's so much waste out there so much waste and most
landfill on the site landfill was worthy to dump all the shrubs and trees and brush all
those here so I think will be minor landfills a change in the air so what will you and what
I do is that yet we should be taken at Islamorada when I was in New Jersey that the form that
I work with up there who called the chart formulation with me that the charter concentrate
it was a it was Gloucester County and like the thousand yards chips three years home
had a dislike of what it up but there were so many hoops to go to read and talk to those
people and we have a chart unit were still shopping it's a biochar unit became the char
you I could use because that a lot of lot of good things to it one is that the shapes
and sizes of the material common in can be for debate you have to make a certain size
material and go through some conveyor to develop some hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of dollars no now we got a unit that can work with different materials we
can use the Bob course was very interested in all the energy application source okay
let's what's make that happen here that's how we got here and and I just I wanted you
to see this because this is called the cascaded you so there's different application so with
his transplant the amount of char output into the ground is so tiny it's almost nonexistent
book what when you're making char and as we get better at making amendments more profitable
you'll be able to bomb and were working with Virginia Tech on this policy picture this
is your your field you can have raised beds you know they're doing permanently raised
beds and are you grow cover crops on and he's working on a machine that can basically put
the chart downright down the road and that's what you do with this if you use a tribal
concentrate you only put it right were the plants can be so were making an amendment
now were calling a chart resource filtration bags out there Om so we can apply it right
with the plants can be right, planning rope he's got a thing or you can you can open it
up drop the work on a chart resource which will be a fully loaded char write down the
slot here and then in that slot you can translate right behind Saddam can get up to more mechanized
agriculture and now you're applying quite a bit of char you're currently change in the
fertility that will reduce your energy needs over time you can keep going each time or
in a field situation again you go write down the row you know maybe 2 inch wide area they
were the plants can be announce your rotating that out maybe the next time you go this way
it's the bout now you can permanently build your fertility of soil but you do it by placing
it right with the plants can grow that's where the money now that's where the mayhap that
that's why want to see this the idea of think of cascading uses think of okay you for the
transplant but then I want to build the salt the same times meet up with some of the soil
on and and large-scale agriculture citizen revealed now out the Midwest with a laser
grade old water runs two point let's rubber nutrients run off to you char box it right
there collecting nutrients put a backup on the field USDA was working on that in 2000
90 the workshop but if you think of multiple uses that ever try to your target synergy
the HR by itself doesn't work it's a chart with the biology the biology with foods the
foods with a cover crop when you multiply all those pieces together that's how you get
to better yield at less cost so Om as of yet in Sweden are doing on a big scale the farm
in Tennessee does it there was up at the chart conference or was there was a company the
reported John was just the urine and they were taken to making fertilizer and I said
get that down here back when should not be there that you have joined the back the estimate
yet opted about them again you could do that and what more malice talk about yes so got
this char and it sits by itself it doesn't do much for you you load it once it's loaded
it all will be things were is a human urine comes out sterile you could put it into the
chart and make that your men visual rock and pop that most people in Europe. I thought,
now why what four letter a goes into the I is is developing away from her holiday children
now either that I or by is that we if we PS okay I easily would you all that and they
are there really is in as the raw material telephone is but after I oval practices: you
are what I as of May yeah. The court also I is available to all that the type of soil
in North America well I reply go that far if this is a us a straight full-size term
for the type of soil of the feeding to see that yeah okay yeah okay via the blog post
the idea the end there so the next time were thinking about Boucher we need to give thanks
to the biochar makers again before us are a you a great I feel in your four people died
in soil FLV the black soil is yeah it's not a few inches for the it is really loose soil
estate the you are far older them are involved in your point of your right right right of
the resume on our of so certainly like to okay yet there were other far All no not all
not all onto saying when it when they did the County state capacitors that tell the
answer became yes so they were naturally for ~it is an in-line racing and nothing you also
that all carbons are good source to to bring her chart your chart sure to your or or logo for
our company is the is his pinecone on so you could you could chart Christmas tree but the
dryer the tree better normally rid of if the government barrels of pesticides and herbicides
that they need to get rid of a law if you take those molecules you are not mild oxidant
is another not and is actually big companies that the rendering of the by taking the capsules
program hot enough under pressure whatever it takes but some insane processes they were
using American cans out here you can actually annihilate a lot of those microcell in the
chemist Do the chemistry behind the hello that is how so I I would be too concerned
about one a Christmas tree farm you can get into the organic stuff degree and sooner or
later is that it's all around what I find a right which is where not use things like
painted or construction waste that has painted or don't males is the lose lose especially
for and no condition so this was a something about it and look back to a lecture about
Christmas trees are I've chart about this history's the reason if you are not the question
one way or is one of the one you will never zone with you or I is in you it really is
is not the same thing I'm wondering about changes a Arthur try for a driver seeing the
we know not everything long my hundred leader in terms of the above he carved with publicly
with all of our RSS no virus I a Rob we talk about his how we they current as farming you
can get this the that a boilers there's a lot of situations where we in better this
way will will throw away process but my company when I over is a where will you people that
are Friday the nasty goal is Alan Wessel is not available for is why do you have harvest
this question for some so we can think that are already going on five hour workweek one
get farmers to do something shalom the economic benefit of doing it and they'll figure out
how to do it will be more innovative than farmers and gardeners so if we can just motivates
them that way shoulder to grow more plants grow bigger plants grow healthier plants and
it's got cost them less money to do it and although doing so in a way my list is backwards
for this audience I should be starting with number four I should be telling you why you
make more money if you use biochar and I believe it's true you To make more money you can grow
bigger better healthier more drought resistant plants with more nutrient density in each
plant and there's lots of science behind all of the amount scientist so you have the advantage
of me not telling you all the tiny details of how that's can work try to explain it from
my point of view but it's just my idea of how it works and how it works is we make the
stuff we put it in the soil given around the roots of the plants and it's amazing what
does the levels of energy and thus the we haven't begun soon understand that I know
there are people here in this room do understand it intuitively that there's more going on
there than meets the that we can explain it was science and one of five things that I
find it always bigwig symposiums with all the the egghead scientists looking at the
stuff is that they're always trying to break it down into these why does it work what is
a work in in the process again it down to the point where okay the chemist will come
and tell you while the chemistry there is carboxyl groups that are holding this and
that it is way over my head and then you get the physicist and he'll be saying oh well
the the hydrophobicity of the sin that is going on and that's going to make that work
and then you get a soil scientist who comes up and says hello this is to make your soil
law more porous than to do this and that and all of those things are true and wonderful
and I'm glad and I thank God for all those people who can study that stuff so much more
intensely than I can but what I feel my gift is that I can come and say know what this
does a whole bunch of things at once it's because it does all of those things that it
makes a huge difference and you can do a lot of scientific experiments get me down into
those little details and they can't see it they can't see that it works because it does
all of these things at once. For instance it holds the biology but if it holds the water
what is an old biology holds a biology because it's got the physical structure but the biology
love to move into there's actually different sized holes of you looked at the summer microscope
that are holding the different size bacteria and fungi all of which are helping your plants
most of which are helping your plants grow and at the same time it's holding onto the
nutrients that those that that biology needs to survive likes to eat so it's providing
housing and food for the welfare system for for biology and it's wholly out of the water
as well big deal on Cape Cod with my sandy sandy soil after it pours rain two days later
under bigger getting my plants are no dry up and the so the question is why does Sandy
soil dry also fell it's just the waters going through it it doesn't hang onto the water
there's not much organic matter their which is what's double bond with this excellent
response to the point were I did my own experiment very nonscientific against Mexico but my soil
and I put it in a couple of the old plastic sherbet containers that you could see through
and it's mixed's 10% March are in one of and left the other one is a control in a Phil
Goldwater the first holes in the bottom the little water and let them drip Tiller was
no water left in and set them on my sun porch to see what would happen in probably forgot
about until about three weeks later and I went looked at him of course one was just
soiled bone dry and the one with the biochar and you could still see the moisture against
the sides of the container him it sounds like snake oil I swear when I start going on about
how many things you can do with this works in the sandy soil because now it becomes that
sponge that's hanging onto the water and it also hangs onto the nutrients the same way
so you have to use less fertilizer every year of whatever kind or using hopefully it's compost
and the good natural organic fertilizers you don't need to use as much because it's not
getting washed away it's being held on to the lets of secondary benefit which doesn't
make me any money directly is the that same phosphorus and nitrogen is in command of the
groundwater which ends up in the pond downstream from which causes algae bloom and all of that
okay so it's filtering it essentially but it's also hanging onto my what am I ideas
is to build a boat put them upon the words got the LG blue filter the water through my
through a big boat full of biochar pull a boat out and dump the biochar in my field
because now I've got all the nutrients out of pond with my filter an important impact
where I can use another hallway looking evidence were sorting out the chemical or the