There's been a discussion fitfully proceeding over the past couple of weeks on the biochar list prompted by the livestock smears by the climate change slime machine - chiefly Stern and Worldwatch. These were also brought up in the comments following Greener Grass.

A recent list message mentioned this Allan Savory lecture and poster given at a Feasta meeting in Dublin: Keeping Cattle - cause or cure for climate crisis?. A message comment by Peter Read was "For me, yet more evidence of how much more efficient good management is than natural reslience (especially when the latter is exploited by bad management)".

I replied:

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You don't have to live in Dublin to have access to the knowledge and thinking that Allan Savory promotes. He has written books on the subject as have many others for many decades. It is common knowledge for those that have some measure of interest in agriculture.

It isn't that good management is much more efficient than natural resilience, it is that good management emulates natural resilience in unnatural conditions. The key insight of managed grazing is that the natural behaviors of the vast herds of ruminants when they had the whole unfenced world to roam can be simulated on the vastly smaller scales available today when most of their former range has been fenced off and plowed down to grow field and row crops.

Though the best lands - those that came into existence in large part because they were grazed by ruminants - are now plowed and degraded, and the ruminants that remain have been forced into marginal lands, they can still make a useful contribution to the continuing improvement of soil, not least the sequestration of large amounts of carbon. They still make soils deeper and more fertile.

See this recent post by Philip Small of NSCSS that discusses grasslands, natural fire and charcoal. He doesn't delve into the livestock part of that natural system since his point is about the microorganisms and plant life of the grasslands, but those lands hosted vast numbers of livestock who existed semi-symbiotically with the microorganisms and vegetation. They were all integral to the system.

We may not be able to let natural fire on the grasslands run unchecked and so continue to build up soil charcoal, but we can emulate natural fire in our pervasively unnatural conditions. We can intentionally make char and spread it. The romance of a depeopled landscape is missing - we make char in retorts and spread it with machines - but in this way we can emulate natural resilience and the natural systems that evolved over deep time.

Many have noted that we may benefit from rethinking our attitudes to natural fire and agricultural burning now that there is better understanding of the benefits of the charcoal produced by frequent low intensity fires. They run through fast and relatively cool, leaving a good percentage of pyrolized carbon that enriches the soil while permanently sequestering carbon. A farmer who burns off crop stubble in the field, and then plows down the char, isn't just tidying up his fields, he is enriching it in ways not appreciated by non-practitioners who lacked the tacit knowledge of growers who live or die as a result of their skill.

Many have also noted that we may benefit from rethinking our attitudes to grazing, the other piece of that old natural puzzle. When you investigate the details of the carbon and nitrogen cycles in such natural systems there is a great deal to admire, and given our concerns about global threats this is more than an aesthetic issue, more than neeping about historical arcana and romantic other whens.

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I think it may be worth noting a bit more history. In the day a grower would turn cattle into his wheat field after harvest and fatten them on the stubble and shattered grain left in the field. Later he would burn the field - a slow and cool fire that would creep along in the remaining stubble and dung. Then he'd prepare a seed bed for the next crop.

The fires were set at a time of year when they likely wouldn't get out of control, and they tended to be smoky, filling the air and raising objections from those who lived nearby. Such burning is increasingly outlawed by air quality regulations.

It's an admirable agronomic system that emulates natural conditions and cares for the land while producing much good food, and with our current grasp of the benefits of charcoal in soil is even more admirable since carbon was durably sequestered and fertilizer need was reduced. The mistaken attempt to reduce air pollution from smoke also increased the air's concentrations of the colorless odorless carbon gasses that we now worry so much about, and degraded the soil in ways that we now better understand.

It may be that we can further improve those old systems by doing our pyrolizing in a more controlled way that reduces smoke and particulate emissions. This is more energy intensive since the biomass would have to be gathered, transported, processed and then returned to the fields. Depending on how that was done and the source of the energy used the costs may exceed the benefits.

Another way to improve the system might be to do it the old way but don't plow the land, just drill the new crop through the surface char, thus eliminating a pass through the field in most cases. It may be that this approach would also help with weed management problems experienced in no-till drill systems that do not burn stubble.

IMV it would be useful if all of these approaches, and others as well, were being trialed as we speak, and the results over a period of years documented for all to read and study so that subsequent trials might benefit from those experiences.