Biochar - the future of sustainable agriculture: Lauren Hale at TEDxUCR

I think we all live in a beautiful world and I'm sure you all can agree with me every once in a while I see something that reminds me of this and recently NASA released photos of the earth taken from afar and you can see us. There, just over the horizon of Saturn, this beautiful bright blue dot and you can't help but realize how unique we are and how beautiful this planet is and we as human beings are stewards of this planet and tonight I'm going to share it. with you is a way that we can be better stewards of CU basically right now we are not doing so well we know that through the burning of fossil fuels we are emitting a large amount of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide that is has accumulated to levels in our atmosphere like we've never seen before and it's simple, matter is never really created or destroyed, so if you extract carbon from the ground and burn it, you release it into the atmosphere and if things in our terrestrial land, like photosynthesizing plants, can't absorb this carbon dioxide fast enough, so it can stay in our atmosphere or join our oceans and when carbon dioxide enters our oceans it causes acidification and our animals really can't handle that. acidification, so this puts entire food webs in our oceans at risk when it remains in our atmosphere. a warming effect leading to melting C ice and extreme weather events, so this is big, but this is not our only problem, we also generate a lot of garbage, currently landfills like this all over the planet have already been filled and closed or they are very close to being full and if you go to a trapped landfill and you dig deep into the landfill and get a core sample, you find completely intact garbage, so these things are not going anywhere very quickly and they are definitely not going to disappear.

At the rate we are doing, we have also transformed many of our pristine forest lands and jungles into agricultural fields and while we work to maximize the productivity of these fields, they are simply not being cut currently, 38% of the world's surface is covered of

agriculture

, not the surface of the world but the land surface of the world, and yet one in seven people on our planet are considered food insecure, meaning they are currently hungry or living in real fear of dying from hunger, so when you look at all of these problems on a global scale, they will only be exacerbated less than 40 years from now, in 2050 our world population is expected to reach 9 billion, that is billions more mouths to feed billions more people who demand energy and billions more people.

Producing garbage on a global scale is overwhelming, it seems hopeless, but what if I told you that this material offers some help in mitigating all these problems? This is

biochar

and this has received intense attention in the last decade from scientists. but there is absolutely nothing new in this idea. Thousands of years ago we believe that the Amazonian natives had a waste disposal practice whereby they would dig deep holes in the ground into the pits, throw in their agricultural waste, their food scraps, even their br en pottery and then light that. burning material after that, they covered the burning material with soil um and this created conditions with very high heat and very low oxygen levels and therefore instead of the carbon in the material being released and oxidized completely as carbon dioxide, it actually stays there in the soils and today we find evidence of this if you look at a typical Amazonian soil, you find very light colored soils, they have very low nutrients, very low in organic matter and they are acidic, so this results in very poor soils for crop production, often farmers clear down an entire area of ​​forest by burning to cultivate that land and then that soil only supports the growth of crops through rotations and then they have to collect it and move it to through the entire process again.

However, within these infertile soils we find rich and deep soils called Tera pretto, so Tera pretta is not like any of the surrounding soils, it is very dark in color, has a high content of organic matter, does not lose nutrients or become It filters, so it favors the growth of crops. much longer and it is not acidic when we look closely at terpret soils to see what makes them different, we find charcoal if you use a high power microscope to look at the charcoal you see that it is covered in these microscopic pores and it is also a very, very dense. of carbon and what this means is that these carbon materials act like a sponge in the soil, they help the soils to retain various nutrients and also help to improve the overall structure of the soil, so a simple practice is used The natives Amazonians improved soil fertility for thousands and thousands of years and we think we can modernize this process, so that if you come to today and you have some type of organic waste material that could be agricultural waste or food scraps, anything , from peanuts. from peels to peach pits to wooden packaging boxes, you can take that material and put it through a process called pyrolysis, and again, that's heating materials with very high heat and very limited levels of oxygen.

When you collect the material, you generate

biochar

and sequester biochar by approximately 50%. of the carbon source, if you allowed the same material to decompose you would be left with compost and that compost after about 5 to 10 years only sequesters 10 to 20% of the carbon source and if you did you would slash and burn farming and burning that waste would leave you with a fine ash and you've only sequestered 3% of the carbon source, so if you take your biochar and add it back to the soil, it can stay in the soil for thousands of years, so it's a kind of service. as a stable carbon sink on our terrestrial land, furthermore, if we produced biochar on a global scale from all organic waste residues, we could produce carbon equivalents of man-made carbon dioxide at 12% annually, which makes a big dent in carbon dioxide. that we are producing not only this, but when you add bioart to the soil, you are improving the fertility of the soil and I will use our local soils as an example here in Riverside, when we amend our local soil with biochar, we increase the water holding capacity of the soil and When we increase the water retention capacity we can reduce our irrigation contributions and this means saving water and we all know how important it is to save water in our region we also reduce the apparent density of the soil, so this is important because when the soils are compacted it is more difficult for roots to grow through them and when soils are less dense we call them well structured soils, so the roots move easily through the soil and that translates into a greater mass of roots and it What you see beneath the ground translates into what you see. see above the ground, so when you have dense, healthy root systems you also have healthy plants and higher plant yields.

We've seen this in our lab when we amended our local soils with biochar, we had cucumber plants 90% larger than when we planted the same seeds. in unamended soils, so it is important to share with you that biochar is not a single material, it is actually a variety of materials and the chemical and physical properties of biochar are different depending on what it is made from and how it is made, But that is why is research like the one we are doing here at UCR so important? In fact, community gardeners here at UCR have gotten involved. Biochar fits perfectly with their sustainability mission and they are looking at biochar on a large scale and testing it. with various types of crops and it is not just UCR biochar has become quite a movement and is gaining momentum in the last decade.

We have seen international societies created and dedicated around this issue. We have databases characterizing different types of biochar published by major academic institutions and products are appearing throughout the market. You can even buy biochar at Whole Foods and you can go to YouTube and look for videos on how to make a pyal testing kit so you can make your own. in the garden and um and heat it with low levels of oxygen so that in your bags you have biochar, you have a small packet of biochar here and this packet is enough biotar to amend a pot of soil this size, so today I challenge you. to be part of a single solution that helps us be better stewards of our planet, thank you