Do You Create Biochar

Alan has a question here about biochar. Do you create biochar to include in your systems at say tuna farm? When and how is this type of amending most beneficial? Do you have special biochar producing systems you prefer or are most efficient? Where does the energy audit fail on producing more than token quantities of biochar? Okay we do make biochar here and I make biochar on most projects and I try and make it in a simple way because I think it's a very simple substance. It's just charcoal taken to the point where it won't burn. It's gone beyond charcoal where all the tree resins have disappeared. The difference between charcoal and biochar is if you get charcoal and you rub it on your hands they go black, you put it under the tap and it won't wash off easily because it's still got tree oils in it. That's why you can re-burn charcoal and it's still a fuel. But if you take it to biochar, if you rub your hands, here comes my dog, yep, if you rub your hands in biochar they go black. You put it under a tap, running tap and it washes off quite easily. That's because the tree oils have gone and where there was tree oil in the charcoal that space is available for large amounts of surface area habitat for microorganisms and that is most beneficial in the wet tropics even beyond that to the equatorial wet tropics. So this whole thing became really popular when the raised gardens of the Amazonian Indians in the Bolivian Amazon, the area of the Amazon they call the Beni, which was probably not really touched much. So there was residual gardens left over and they could see this black substance in these raised gardens and they called it terra preta and it was just added biochar, charcoal, biochar, biochar, charcoal taken beyond the tree oil. But many, many places worldwide we've found people have added biochar into gardens even in cold climates like Finland. Now in those really wet equatorial tropics you get very shallow soils, you get very constant high temperatures, high humidity and everything leaches really easily. The rain is very large drops of rain and it's very high impact on the soil and it can cause enormous leaching effects. Now if you look with a microscope at the bacteria in the soil and it's bacteria, it's bacteria dominated soils that grow non-woody plants. So we know that fungi is needed for forests. Forest soil is fungal dominant because a forest grows on a fallen forest and you can say that the soil is an animal that's all mouth and the fungi are the teeth that eat the wood. But if you want to grow crops they're non-woody plants mostly. So if you want to grow crops in the tropics which are non-woody crops you're going to have to have a lot of bacteria. Now if you use a microscope and look at bacteria you'll find you'll need 600 times magnification just to see them. With 400 times magnification you can see protozoas and flagellates and nematodes because they're a bit bigger and you only need 200 times magnification to see fungi, they're so much bigger and longer. So the thing with bacteria is it's easily washed through the soil particles and if the soil is really thin then it's very easy to wash all the beneficial bacteria out of the soil and that's literally biological leaching of the soil. So it's hard to have large gardens. So what was obviously realized was if you put in lots of shelter in the form of large surface area habitat then you've kind of got safe houses for the bacteria. You've got high rise high density suburbs in the soil. So that's where it's most beneficial where you've got a lot of leaching and it's become very popular. Now you know I think it's something like a tablespoon of dissolved charcoal has a surface area of 10 acres and it's not until you look at it through a microscope you realize how crazy the surface area is. It's incredibly complex little shapes. So really biochar is a byproduct of overcooked charcoal and every charcoal burner would have had a biochar failure. In other words charcoal's been been fired for too long and it won't re-burn because the tree oils are gone and that's your biochar. You don't have to get too fancy about it but I like to teach people how you do it so they get over the mystery. So this is how I do it there's more sophisticated ways of doing it. I get a 44 gallon drum and I cut these triangles at the bottom right and that's my main fire right so that's the main burner and I have to fill that full of wood at the bottom and then I fill this just a garbage bin. I fill it up with the material that I want to turn into biochar and I literally fill it. Now the trouble with this method is this central garbage bin is under a lot of fire so it gets burnt out. So this one's this one's already finished but for this demonstration I can show you what happens. So this is not supposed to have a burnt out bottom it's supposed to be complete but high temperatures will burn out the steel. I fill that now often I use bamboo and it can be green bamboo or it can be dry bamboo all of it will turn into biochar if you burn it long enough and bamboo looks really trendy when you've turned it into biochar and it's quite valuable as interior decorating material and Japanese people really think it it's got great purification effects bamboo charcoal bamboo biochar and it purifies the air apparently. I'm not sure about that but it could be true. I fill that full of my biochar material and I put it inside of this drum and then I stack the outside that's sitting on top of a lot of wood that's going to burn and I stack the outside with wood as well and I stack the top with wood so it's not sitting that low it's sitting on top of the wood down there and wood all the way around and then I fire it up at the bottom and I get it really firing so it's starting to really burn and then when it starts burning I've just got a simple cover here it's just a this tip I put that over the top and now it's really burning and then I start to just put these Besser blocks on it's a bit of a drawer chimney and I can put a few on so I get a bit more of a drawer and at any point I can start to damp it off a little bit and just reduce the amount of draw there is in there so it just turns into a slower burn and then if I get it right and it's not that hard to do when she's all finished I unstack it it's all burnt out I open up the garbage can in the middle and there it is got beautiful charcoal and if we're and hopefully it's gone past charcoal and it's biochar and it and if it's bamboo it you can kind of knock it and it kind of chimes ding ding ding ding ding ding ding it's kind of brittle it can look quite beautiful you crack it rub it powder it up get your hands all black put it under the tap see if it washes off and if it does you're there so that's one of the things we do don't pay any attention to this thing behind me because that's something completely different because we also make bone char with a chimney but that's another story I'll tell you another day