Finger Lakes Biochar

I’ve just returned from an amazing trip to Costa Rica where I met more people working with biochar than I know working with biochar in the entire state of New York (outside of researchers of course!). This shouldn’t really surprise me as Costa Rica is known as being very eco-centric (though some of the natives I met said that attitude doesn’t necessarily extend to agriculture) and they have been making biochar in one form or another for more than 20 years as I wrote about previously.

The Estufa Finca project has been hard at work providing grass roots education to rural farmers, immigrant laborers and others on how to make biochar using clean cook stoves (see picture). I was lucky enough to meet some of the folks they’ve trained and work with including an Agroforester that chars much of the debris from his permaculture forest and uses is around a wide variety of trees. He also makes biochar soap and toothpaste from it which of course I had to purchase to add to my collection (who knows, perhaps I’ll even try the toothpaste one of these days!). I also met an organic cacao/chocolate producer that converts forest and cacao debris into biochar and uses it around their ‘finca’. I didn’t find any ‘Charcolate’ there, but who knows, maybe someone has tried making this somewhere (anyone?)! I even found jewelry made from biochar (see ‘joyas de biocarbon’ pic) which was a first for me.

The sheer amount and diversity of underutilized biomass in the country is mindboggling. The other thing that boggles the mind is the craziness of the weather and its impact on soils and plant life. Visiting during wet season was perhaps a bit ‘deluge-ional’ in retrospect but it also opens your eyes to the vast amount of soil that washes down their streets, rivers and mountainsides with every heavy rain. [I swear they use snowplows to remove some of it since you would see a steep cut-off of soil all along sidewalks.] What really surprised me though is that for the first time in recent memory, Costa Rica has been suffering fairly substantial droughts during the dry season to such an extent that all water was shut off for 2 days at a time in one part of the country.  Such is the face of climate change in the tropics.

With all that soil eroding goes an awful lot of chemicals. I learned that per hectare of crop land Costa Rica uses more pesticides than any other country on earth (can I get a ‘yikes’?)! We even had a crop duster fly over our car and dump its load of god knows what right over our heads. I held my breath, rolled up the windows and then laughed at my own naiveté. As if that would help!

Not surprisingly, this scenario seems to me to be a prime opportunity for biochar. All that vegetation converted into biochar could help reverse the impacts of soil erosion and adsorb some of the pesticides to prevent them from contaminating ground water.  If and when biochar is accepted as an official carbon offset product, it could also provide substantial help to Costa Rica in achieving their 2021 target of becoming the first carbon neutral country in the world!

Biochar Optimization Framework

Later this month I’ll be visiting one of my favorite places on earth: Costa Rica, a nation highly focused on sustainability. Not surprisingly Costa Rica has some very interesting biochar initiatives that have been going on for several years which I am hoping to check out while I am there.

I am also excited to be talking to some AgroEcology students about biochar during my trip as well as visiting coffee, cacao and banana plantations. I was pondering how best to talk about biochar to an audience that most definitely understands their local crops, climates and challenges far better than I ever will, but may not know much about biochar and its potential benefits. And thus the Biochar Optimization Framework was born. The basic idea is to understand constraints and then determine if and how biochar might be able to mitigate those constraints.

Much of the research and promotional focus for biochar often seems to be on its ability to impact yield. With a growing population, this is obviously critical for food security. But the reality is that there are a lot of different growing constraints which biochar can potentially impact. In some cases these constraints may be more pressing than improving yield especially in those cropping systems where yield is deliberately constrained to ensure higher quality harvests. Given that I thought I’d try to figure out a way to understand the various things that growers are dealing with and also provide a framework for figuring out where biochar might be able to provide benefits.

Growing Constraints

Using this framework I’ve sketched out how this could be applied to vineyards in the Finger Lakes but what I think would be really interesting and useful is to create similar biochar optimization frameworks for different crops in different soils and different climate conditions. So that’s my self imposed mission for the Costa Rica trip: see how well this little tool works in getting a solid understanding of how the right kind of biochar might be able to benefit different types of agriculture.  I’ll blog about my findings from the land of chocolate, coffee and bananas.  Can’t wait!

Pura Vida!

Biochar Decarbonization Roadmap

I tend to prefer carrots over sticks, not just because they taste better, but because I think as a motivational tool, carrots are more effective. Perhaps this is why the notion of a price on carbon doesn’t really make me (and a lot of others) want to jump up and cheer. Punitive measures seem to do a really excellent job of stirring up the opposition to any sort of regulation and a not-so-excellent job of getting anyone motivated to race down the decarbonization path, which is really what is needed. So when I read this article in Yale’s e360 saying that the key recommendation by leading scientists and economists to decarbonize the global economy is to mandate an increasing price on carbon, I was a bit dismayed (no disrespect, these folks all have IQs in the stratosphere). Where I do agree with the authors is when they describe the need for ‘detailed, realistic decarbonization plans’, a sort of Atkins (low carb) Diet for the planet if you will.

Normally I focus on biochar’s ability to recarbonize the soil, but recently I have come to realize that that is actually what happens at the end of the biochar cascade. Sustainable biochar production could actually be a hugely effective decarbonization path for a number of different industries. [It could even be used at a municipal or college campus level as I’ve mentioned previously.]

Let’s take food processing as a fairly straightforward example of how biochar can help decarbonize an industry. I’ll use the example of a cherry juice producer that landfills tons of cherry pits each week. Here’s how on-site biochar production could not only provide a Carbon detox but perhaps more importantly from a motivational perspective, save them beaucoup bucks!

• Reduced fossil fuel energy – on-site pyrolysis can generate significant amounts of heat which can be turned in to electricity which is needed for the production and refrigeration process.  Supplying your own fuel source could translate into huge cost reductions.
• Reduced waste management– paying a waste removal service to transport pits to a landfill is not something companies like doing. As this type of company grows, so does the waste management cost and the GHG emissions related to transportation and methane emissions once this type of waste is landfilled. Who would say no to no tipping fees!
• Increased revenue potential – manufacturers could set up off-take agreements for the biochar produced.  Trash to cash – got to love that!

The biochar decarbonization roadmap can be applied to many, many different types of industries from farming to forestry to food processing. Appropriate scale pyrolysis equipment to serve this market is still in its infancy but the landscape is changing fast. Equipment will need to pass strict emissions regulations (rightly so) which may slow down the adaptation of these technologies, but the biochar decarb pathway is being built. This is one bandwagon I predict many industries will eagerly jump on once the economic benefits are quantified!

One of the properties of biochar that I never gave much thought to until recently is its low thermal conductivity. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what low thermal activity meant in terms of its usefulness for biochar. [Confessions of a non-scientist!] But in just the last week I read two different research papers focused on two completely different end uses for biochar that mentioned it, so I decided it was time to become a little less ignorant on the topic.

The first mention I came across was in a recently translated article on Biochar use as a building material from the Ithaka Institute (full disclosure: I am thrilled to now be working with this organization, but more on that in the future). In this context low thermal conductivity translates to high insulation which is a good thing in the construction industry. All those pockets of air, or pore space within biochar creates a kind of lattice structure that slows down the movement of heat. [Come to think of it slowing down hot air would be really helpful in our current political arena! I’ll have to think how biochar could creatively be used to do that …]

The second mention I found was in a paper called “Biochar in growing media: A sustainability and feasibility assessment” written by some of the gods of biochar research. This paper has some really great info comparing biochar to other growing media, but what caught my eye was this statement: “Charcoal has a heat capacity similar to soil and peat but much lower thermal conductivity that could provide thermal buffering.“ The paper was hypothesizing that this could provide some protection to nursery stock. There has been some intriguing biochar related research on this topic, but not all that much from what I’ve found.

One of the reasons I found this so interesting is that the winter we just experienced in the Finger Lakes was a tad on the brutal side. Very long and very cold. Vineyards suffered and no one is quite sure yet how bad the long term damage will be. This got me wondering if biochar might be able to act as some type of frost buffer for NE vineyards. To be on the safe side many vineyards practice something called ‘hilling up’ in the fall which tills soil up above the graft zone of the vines as a means of protecting them from the cold – some vineyards use straw around the vines as well. In the spring the soil is then ‘hilled down’ to allow air flow around the vines. Given its low thermal conductivity, hilling up with biochar or a biochar + pomace compost could possibly provide a nice thermal blanket which would be tilled down into the soil in the spring. Sadly this year they may end up having to pull out quite a few acres of vines which are often burned to get rid of the biomass. Turning these vines into biochar and then using the char/pomace compost to hill up in the fall might be one way to turn a negative into a positive.

And for NE farmers with annual crops perhaps using biochar might allow seeds to be planted a bit earlier in spring if it helps buffer soil temperatures!

Coming up soon…frost protection techniques are in need of a biochar intervention!

Make biochar out of invasive species

Today I read about how the NY DEC will be doing a controlled burn of 14.5 acres at a wetland to rid the area of phragmites australis (aka the common reed). Apparently this kind of controlled burn, also called a prescribed fire, is pretty common.   Little did I know (till this morning actually) that every year hundreds of thousands of acres are deliberately torched for a variety of reasons, from habitat management to wildfire control.   That’s a whole lotta CO2 going up in smoke, not to mention fine particulate matter which is no doubt aiding & abetting asthma!

I totally get the reasons for doing this, but I can’t help thinking that it’s a bit of a wasted opportunity.  Time for another biochar intervention me thinks!  Yes, charring would be far more labor intensive (read: expensive), but it would also be safer, less polluting in terms of air quality,  AND provide a by-product that could potentially enable increased bio-diversity and improved water quality. Heck maybe they could even sell the standing invading or diseased biomass to a biochar producer for a few bucks and have the biochar companies come in to ‘CHARvest’ the lot.  Seems like a fair trade to me.

There are already a few ways to convert invasive species or forestry slash  into biochar.  One interesting model is from Carbon Cultures, which looks something like a tent but acts like a mobile kiln.  Another option from down under is the CharMaker, made by Earth Systems Bioenergy. The char produced could be used strategically within the area charred to help rejuvenate soils or remediate any toxins.

A third option which offers interesting possibilities for areas that drain down into a body of water, might be do dig a ditch and burn the biomass in the ditch (see great ‘how-to’ post here).  Leaving the char in situ would help keep excess nutrients or toxins from polluting wet lands and other water bodies.

That food versus fuel argument sometimes bandied about to quench the hope for biochar is looking sillier and sillier…