Making Biochar Today

[Kraft Marty]

We will be making biochar on Monday, November 14 at Tracy Garden, 5630 Tracy at 1:00 PM. Putting biochar in the soil slows global warming. If everybody did it it could make a difference. Please join me. S'mores can be had, roasted on the fire.

Marty Kraft

Please respond to global warming in your own way. Let care of nature become second nature. 

[David Yarrow]

hello marty,

sadly, i can't make it to your biochar burn today.  i'm still in southeast MO bootheel.

thursday i visited a rhyolite quarry to investigate obtaining their magma dust from fracturing this dense igneous bedrock.  looks very promising.  attached are a few photos, some of the rhyolite bedrock, others of the quarry operation.

water washes dust & fine debris from the rock crusher into a slurry pond, where it slowly de-waters.  attached is a photo of a hand coated with this thick slurry mud; this mud is freshly fractured dust from a dense volcanic bedrock.  primary, unreacted elements that haven't yet been weathered into complex mineral compounds.  this is high quality, concentrated food for soil microbes to scavenge elements nutrients and build new topsoil.

slurry ponds fill up, so mud is bucketed into trucks to dump in remote locations in the quarry and allowed to dry out in 8 foot thick beds.  the quarry has no use or market for this "waste."  rather, it's an annoyance that must be managed, handled, moved, stored, etc. at expense of money, manpowerr & equipment time.

i believe this primary mineral matter is loaded with easily available trace elements and rare earth elements -- the very nutrients that are acutely deficit in most midwest soils.  if you haven't read it yet, see my 3-page article on ryolite:

www.terra-char.com/rhyolite

samples of this dust were sent for complete elemental analysis to screen for potential toxic elements.  southeast MO is a lead-mining region, and other heavy metals may be present that could be troublesome if they accumulate in soils (more reason to apply these materials with biochar or other fine particle size carbon).  if tests are encouraging, a dump truck load of this dried mud will be spread on farmland for field trials to see its effects on soil & plant growth.

for a green & peaceful planet,

david yarrow