Re: [biochar] looking to sell good quality of biochar, who can help me please

[erichjknight]

Dear Biochar Lists,

Kevin doesn't make a lot of sense, he has been reading our list for close to 9 years now, and has generally disparaged biochar in so many of his postings.

Basically biochar works as long as it is prepared properly, I guess Kevin doesn't read what David yarrow has said.

Does not appreciate his production of earthworms, nor the rhyolite rock dust which adds to his success.

Basically the soil dictates how and why the biochar needs to be treated prior to Incorporation. Certainly in order to prepare your biochar a proximate analysis will help.

Fixed carbon percentage, percentage of Ash, the temperature it was produced at, the pH, are all important

PH needs to be adjusted for both the soil and how the biochar was made. I basically disagree with the IBI definition, the percentage of Ash does not the biochar make, but needs to be attended to, or modified depending upon the soil and crop that it is going to be used on.

The high Ash content of Coaltec's manure based high phosphorus biochar needs to be put in a situation where the high pH helps the soil and crops. Even though it has a relatively low fixed carbon rate it is still biochar.

Rick Wilson yes , is under the constraints of the CAB, and the limitations of his area, however Bioforcetec utilizing human manure has overcome the same constraints and limitations and are building two more waste treatment plants in Rick Wilson's area of California.

I certainly will not contradict the greater economic Follies that Alan Page speaks about, they are certainly difficult to overcome. But I see companies growing exponentially, precisely because they solve present problems. And do it at a profit, example is Coaltec. If you ordered a gasifier from them today it would be three years before you could bring it online.

I certainly hope the same for the gasifier company from the Netherlands that I recently posted about, Stercore BV, they are using  a franchise development model for their gasifier plants which produce 65000 metric tons of biochar each, and they presently plan to build 8 of them across Europe. Given their feed stocks they are planning to sell their biocarbon for $0.37 per pound.

 Gasifiers have no significant emissions, the nitrogen is released as N2, atmospheric nitrogen up the stack.

Erich J Knight 

Sent from my Sprint Phone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Rick Wilson ric...@yahoo.com [biochar]" <bio...@yahoogroups.com>

Date: 6/4/18 1:21 AM (GMT-05:00)

To: bio...@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [biochar] looking to sell good quality of biochar, who can help me please

 

Kevin, You make perfect sense. As you suggest, a protocol is what is needed, and it is certainly doable.  

And what we do as a biochar community, should be integratabtle into the Healthy Soil Initiatives being advanced by the USDA and CDFA, who are also struggling with this same issue, that is a need to develop an actionable model, but with a wider net of amendments and practices. 

The goal is to simplify, get an 80/20 solution, focus on the 80.  Agree to a model of how soil works from what is taught to soil scientists, and explain everything from established measurement perspective, out of it a constraint based model (what soil constraint is the biochar relieving, and what properties are important and necessary), stay away from the unexplained and interesting 20%, call it research needed.  (from that new IBI biochar testing protocols would be developed, I am sure).  

The action for IBI (or perhaps someone from private industry who wants to create and sell a service) to put together a team and funding to develop a protocol, which I will call a model.  

To include academics from the biochar world, but also practicing conventional soil scientists, and those with scale field experience. 

Rick

On Jun 3, 2018, at 8:18 PM, kchi...@seaside.ns.ca [biochar] <bio...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Recent postings allude to the wonderous complexity of biochars and the systems in which they could be used to advantage. Basically, we are left with the message: “Biochar “X” will give excellent results when used to grow Crop “Y” in soil “Z”, from which we can logically infer that biochar “A” could give poor results when used to grow Crop “B” in soil “C”.

 

It is very clearly obvious that one cannot put “biochar” on any soil growing any crop and count on improvement. With luck, there will be an improvement. Unfortunately, “luck” is not science, in that it is not necessarily repeatable. 

 

I see an interesting parallel between “biochar” and “drugs”. There are many of each, and when each is used in the right application, and under the right circumstances, they can both accomplish wonders. There is an interesting opportunity here: The IBI could become “the biochar equivalent to the Federal Drug Administration”, by specifying what specific biochars could be used to treat a particular set of specific soil conditions. Then, competent people who knew how to diagnose soil conditions (“Soil Doctors”) could then “prescribe” the best IBI approved “biochar” for treating the specific soil. Without such a protocol, a recommendation to “Use Biochar” is about as helpful to a Farmer/Grower as telling a sick person to “Use Drugs”. 

 

Does that make sense?

 

Kevin

 

From: bio...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:bio...@yahoogroups.com] 
Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2018 2:31 PM
To: bio...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [biochar] looking to sell good quality of biochar, who can help me please

 

  

Alan,  I wanted to address my agency regulated paradigm.

 

Personally, I live within 2000 feet of doctors, dentists, grocery stores, UPS stores, restaurants.  We walk year round in San Diego.  Our house is solar powered.  We drive plug in hybrid cars. And we grow vegetables.

Clearly my family is completely aligned with localizing to the extent that is possible. 

 

But this model breaks down quickly with biochar, when you consider scale, and the imbalance between feedstock supply and biochar demand.  

 

Take for example Ventura County.  North of LA, its the most expensive and productive year round farm land in America.  Produces high value crops, think strawberries, $50,000 per acre revenue per crop cycle (two). 

Some of the soils are high in clay and benefit greatly from biochar.   Lots of money to pay for it.  Biochar is trucked in. 

 

Why not just make biochar there in Ventura? 

Because there is no feedstock.  

Yes there are agriculture residues, but these are composted and the carbon returned to the soil.  Soil needs labile carbon like you get from compost, more than it needs biochar.

And strawberry leaves to not make for a good biochar.

 

And lets say you found some feedstock want to build a biochar machine?  

Well this is north of LA.  In the past there were huge air pollution problems, its sunny, and there are lots of people. Super stringent air quality requirements.  

I’ve tried to find commercial scale pyrolysis machines that can guarantee emissions, there are none. 

 

I live in an agency regulated paradigm.  That is, a set of real constraints that I am forced to work within. 

 

Do I guarantee the outcome of biochar.  No.  

What i do is identify soil constraints (that is physical and chemical properties), properties that are well established from 50 year old soil science.

I guarantee properties and reference established soil science.  

 

Rick Wilson

 

 

On Jun 2, 2018, at 9:17 AM, Alan Page al...@greendiamondsystems.com [biochar] <bio...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

 

Hi Sean,

I have said this stuff at least twenty times before and those who are in the "biochar" market do not want to hear it, but I will try once again to lay out the reality:

1) Rural life was disrupted by the banking and corporate establishment from the start of the settlement of the north american continent, but it really got serious when the industrialists started the "Adaptive Program for Agriculture" (APA) in the 50s. The records of this horrible economic travesty are proudly stored at the Carnegie Foundation in NYC. This program consisted of the removal or lowering of price supports for agricultural produce below the cost of production so that much of rural farm labor had to move to cities - urban ghettos where they had to buy their sustenance.

2) APA was then copied globally using people like John Perkins (The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) to bribe leaders into taking loans so large that the country could never pay them off - thus tying their country permanently to banker control.

3) This and other programs have solidified the "mining" culture of global commerce using financing that focuses on short term financing of everything.

4) Part of this control involved the destruction of the carbon base of agricultural soils with continuous cropping, chemical fertilizer, oil replacement of labor on large corporate farms, use of GMO technology for a variety of purposes, the list is very long...