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Originally Posted by SoloNoMo
This is different from grilling charcoal in that it is produced in a pretty much oxygen-free oven. The resulting gases are used rather than allowed to escape and the resulting charred plant waste does not break down in the soil, at least not in anyone's lifetime! Studies done in South America have found that the charcoal found in these ammended plots of land to be centuries old. There is a company in Colorado that is using trees that have been killed by the beetle invasion to create Biochar. Just gotta figure out how to get a few bags here for trial!
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I hate to burst your bubble, but all charcoal is made in an oxygen-free environment. That's how charcoal is made. Now the shaped brickettes are processed to get them all the same size and shape, but the initial process to turn wood into charcoal is basically the same for any charcoal. Heat cellulose in an anaerobic environment and it becomes charcoal.
It works because it is a quick way to add humus (stable carbon) to soil. If you add typical mulches and manures to soil, it takes several years (usually at least 3-4 minimum) before all the bacteria, protozoa, fungus, insects, worms etc etc recycle it down over and over to stable carbon humus. That's one reason why highly fertile high humus soils are rich and black and have a different structure, even if the subsoil is red clay. Charcoal in the soil reaches that stage very quickly.
PS Just as a bit of history trivia. The reason "organic" is called "organic" is because of the early soil scientists discovering the importance of stable carbon in the soil. Organic chemistry is sub-discipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms. This helped differentiate it between conventional chemical fertilizer methods that use primarily salts. Most people confuse "organic" with "traditional" or "natural". It is not true. Organic agriculture always was science based from the very beginning when the term was chosen. The confusion came because the original founders of organic first started by scientifically testing many "old fashioned", "natural" and/or "traditional" methods in comparison plots, and those that worked they adapted to modern agriculture, and those that didn't they discarded as myth.
For example in the 1920's Rudolf Steiner developed Bio-dynamic Agriculture. It had a lot of good ideas in it like the use of manures and mulches and viewing the entire ecosystem of a farm as a whole, similar to permaculture. But it also had a lot of unscientific hocus pocus crap too, like astrology and cosmic forces and energy vortexes, along with really wacky stuff like burying a cows horn filled with crystals in a pseudo religious ceremony.
So what the founders of organic tried to do was develop a modern sustainable science based agriculture that was founded on soil health and the carbon cycle, instead of the other modern science based agriculture that was based on salts and large energy inputs and not sustainable.
Funny to me how Albert Howard, J I Rodale and Lady Eve Balfour etc. were right all along, even back in the 1940's when no one else in science understood the importance of the carbon cycle or even heard the term global warming!
