Or, Carbon Madness part II.

The recent kerfuffle about the nutritional content of organic foods being no better than main stream foods is an opportunity to focus on real agriculture rather than pye eyed nonsense. Food is better when good seed is grown in fertile soil. Period. Not all plant cultivars are equally capable of producing nutrient rich foods, and to reach their nutrient potentials they need good homes. Some people may find spiritual comfort in bowing to the four corners and chanting as they plant when the moon is proper, or the priests bless their acts or whatever, and they are welcome to comfort themselves. But when they seek to elevate their superstitions to the realm of public policy or make false marketing claims then they should be busted by government and civil society.

There is a nexus of such food fetishists and carbon wankers - sometimes, some people are both and they are racking their fevered brains for ways to exploit food and carbon concerns to advance their agendas. A presentation by David Yarrow at the recent North American Biochar Conference is a case in point.

Ultimately, it is consumers who buy food. It’s consumers who fire up food markets with demand, whether for fresh produce, wonder bread or whole grains. If consumers demand organic food, farmers will grow food without synthetic chemicals. If processors demand GMO foods, farmers will grow them. If the market says, “give us food grown with biochar,” farmers will buy biochar.

In the 80s, consumers demanded food grown without synthetic chemicals, and we created organic food production and certification to define and deliver that food quality. Now, we must go “beyond organic” to offer 21st century consumers another choice. The emerging biochar businesses and its supporting movement must form a trade association to establish standards, protocols, trademarks, licensing, and marketplace identity for its products. These are complex, long and difficult tasks, but they begin at this conference.

Very, very few consumers give a fig about organic foods. This is a fetish of a small but wealthy and vocal minority - a small, single digit percentage of all food produced. It will never be greater despite the loud screeching of zealots since it fails to satisfy the basic requirements of a sensible agronomic system: it can't feed the people. For the real farmers who produce the overwhelming majority of food and manage the overwhelming majority of land the demands of the tiny minority of zealots are irrelevant. Those demands can be met by boutique operations and a few industrial operations that see a business benefit to serving a small premium market.

Zealots are unable to do useful analyses of the food system or make useful prescriptions for its improvement, perhaps because they are blinded by the propaganda that they developed to market their wares. They seem to believe their own marketing claims though they are nonsensical. The idea that mainstream farmers do not know how to grow foods and don't care if their produce is deficient is idiotic. They know as much and often more about soil health, the nutrient content of their produce, the long term health of their land and the environmental impact of their operations as the most fevered zealots.

These are the people whose requirements must be met for biochar to be used in meaningful quantities. This is obvious to anyone with any sense at all. Just as they are the ones who use the overwhelming majority of manure, compost and other soil amendments that organic nutters mistakenly think of as their own private practices, they are the ones who will use biochar in significant quantities.

Some understanding of those requirements might come by analogy to their experiences with manures. The problem with manure is that it isn't a balanced soil amendment. When used repeatedly year after year soil gets ever more unbalanced as a variety of substances in the manure accumulate. This tale is often told naming heavy metal toxins or salts, but even primary nutrients such as phosphorus accumulate in excess since they are not consumed in the quantities supplied, and are not mobile in soil. They don't even leach away unless the soil where they are located erodes too.

The lack of mobility is a problem. If manures are surface applied and not plowed down they just sit there on the surface in the top couple of inches of soil, though plant roots are below that and so don't benefit from the bounty. Conservation tillage - no-till and other tillage avoidance methods - are best practices for many reasons, so there seems to be a conflict.

Growers deal with the problem directly by applying manures below ground, at depths of 1 or 2 feet, without tillage. The material is injected - knifed in, shanked in, there are various descriptive terms for the process. This takes special equipment and powerful machines, but that's what they do for a living so it isn't the big deal that it might seem to amateurs and hobby growers. It also reduces volatilization, the loss of nitrogen as ammonia gas during bacterial decomposition of organic nitrogen. They do the same when applying ammonia directly and it is beneficial for urea as well since it too passes through an ammonia phase during bacterial mineralization.

The same methods, with perhaps some slight equipment modifications, allow biochar to be applied below ground. It would make sense to mix it with a manure slurry and other additives as needed to do it all in a single pass to reduce costs and soil compaction. Done this way the cost of the char is balanced in part by reduced need for some nutrients, improved water management, and habitat for beneficial microorganisms. These are important issues for growers so they will be attentive to methods that affect them.

I suspect that many of these types of systems are in development and perhaps trial though they are not the stuff of activist press releases or talking shops. They are mentioned casually here and there - no big deal - as some grower is interviewed for a TV show (Ag tv, not entertainment shows). Some equipment vendors talk of devices with small mods for biochar shanking, such as pressurized delivery to improve material flow.

I've talked before about the Keyline System, especially its use of Yeomans plows. The Keyline system was first published in 1954 by P.A. Yeomans, thus the name of the plow. Specifically:

The Yeomans Plow Company (Pty Ltd) also produce a 'shank pot seeder' that when attached to the plough, is designed to drop seed or fertiliser into the sub-surface furrow.

A minimum of two passes with the plough are proposed, twelve months apart. The first to a maximum of 150mm (6 inches) depositing seed to produce biomass and the second to a greater depth, with an adapted 'shank pot seeder' or trailing air seeder, to trial injecting biochar into the channel and or spreading the material on the surface.

Greater detail:

Mounted directly behind each 22” shank on our Yeomans Keyline plow is a seedbox that enables us to drop seed directly into the rips created by the shanks. Whether it’s a pasture grass or legume to boost feed value, a taprooted dynamic accumulator to mine fertility and build soil or a secondary crop maximizing the use of your field, this system provides a simple and effective means of making use of the friable planing bed the plow creates.

Additionally, we’re in the process of developing a liquid feed injection system. This simple tractor mounted system makes it possible to literally pour fertility directly into the subsoil rips via 1/8” tubing mounted behind the shanks. Liquid fertilizer amendment options include compost tea, sea minerals, skim milk and more. This simple system allows you to get even more out of each pass.

The type of equipment Yeomans describes is dead common in heavy metal agribusiness but on a much larger scale requiring serious tracked tractors to pull them.

Consumers will not have measurable influence on whether biochar is used, just as they have had little influence on the use of organic methods, however noisy some of them can be. A tiny number of opportunistic zealots may make some money by agitating and trying to whip up a small but vocal support group, but the effect on the system will be negligible at best. What will have infleunce is a strict cost/benefit analysis. Growers pay attention to small increases in production since they do it on a scale that makes even small benefits add up. If char can be shown to be an amendment that improves their already world leading productivity, and does so for a cost that is less than that benefit, then it will be in demand.