2nd Nordic Biochar Seminar Towards a carbon negative agriculture

This is the event of the year!

Nordic association of agricultural sciences soil water environment horticulture

Unfortunately I won't be going... €300 for a couple of seminaries is frankly, robbery...

I can't help it: must share!

The Results Are In… Again! Read the astonishing news from the re:char team in western Kenya.

Happy new year

An apology is in order since a few months have passed since the last update. This year will hopefully be filled with a lot of interesting news about biochar. I am just one exam short of my masters degree and the future lies open. Who knows, if I am working full time with biochar in a few months. Nobody knows.

So, these are my wishes and dreams for the year 2013.

Biochar and disease

There is not much litterature on this issue as of yet but I found this intriguing article:

Elad, Y. et al. Induction of systemic resistance in plants by biochar, a soil-applied carbon sequestering agent. Phytopathology 100, 913–921 (2010).

I confess, I haven't read it through but the pictures are nice :) I will probably come back to this issue later on since my master's thesis discusses plant disease.

Stress peas update

Left: biochar, right: control

It is very exciting for me to tell you that the pea experiment is showing more and more results. Note: there are still flaws in the setup and the experiment is for proof of concept only.

The picture is telling us two stories. First, the biochar peas are now suffering from what I think is some kind of infection or insect feeding. Small marks on the lower parts of the stem are clearly visible. The yellowing leaves could also be a sign of too much water (we had a few days of heavy raining and the pots have no hole for excess water to drain out). This only proves the water binding capacity of biochar. This hypothesis is also supported by higher moisture in the biochar pot. (note to self: get a moisture meter)

Biochar peas under attack!

Secondly, there are now peas growing on the biochar plants as a result of earlier flowering. I can only speculate on what effects earlier flowering and thus earlier formation of peas can have on agricultural uses of biochar, but I think it is a good sign.

Biochar and stress

Observation: Just to see the effects of biochar on plants in my own garden I planted peas in two pots. The pots doubled as weights for the barbeque cover. Accidentally the pots were covered with the cover and were thus deprived of light for a while. I can only assume that the pots were covered for the same amount of time since it happened by accident and I wasn’t there doing measurements. However, when I uncovered the already germinated peas this was the result:

Left: biochar amended soil (1/5), Right: control. Plant: Pisum sp.

 

Hypothesis: There could be a number of reasons for this phenomenon but I can narrow them down to the two most likely:

1.       Biochar has speeded the growth of the pea making it thicker and thus more resistance to cover (the cover was quite heavy ~thin raincoat) Also if you look closely at the pictures the one grown in biochar is thicker and has a little greener leaves.

2.       Biochar helps the pea recover more easily from stress. Senescent leaves are absent from the pea grown in biochar.

Future prospects: Whatever the exact reason I plan to make further experiments where I include more samples and have some plants covered by pressing down the stalks and some where I only deprive the plants of light for a period. Stay tuned for more.

World bio energy @ Elmia Jönköping, Sweden

I'm back from a wonderful 3 days of bio energy fair (and conference) in Sweden. My personal experience from this event is that biochar is not (yet) that interesting for the big companies (Metso and others) since they mainly focus on burning of biomass such as wood or pellets.

However, I got in touch with a guy involved in testing of a biochar facility in Costa Rica. The company was specialized in pyrolysis of hazardous materials and e.g. rubber tires. I am about to mail him soon and hopefully he can give some insight of what is going on with biochar in South America. There were also a few companies that are producing biochar through pyrolysis or that are using pyrolysis for gas production and one of them, Volter, even was from Finland. They have built a test village outside of Oulu in northern Finland that produces its heat and electricity from pyrolysis. The sales person didn't mention biochar but where there is pyrolysis there is biochar...