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Biochar: The Oldest New Thing You've Never Heard Of | Wae Nelson | TEDxOrlando

Jun 07, 2021
I have a package of

biochar

in my hand here. Now I know when you look at this you see a big black spot, but when people ask me about this, I just say this will change the world. I have a new granddaughter and now she just turned her first birthday about a month ago and one of the

thing

s I find surprising is how early they learned to act in front of the cameras, but those of you who have children or grandchildren know how much this focus on the future. for you and me it did the same and my concerns as I look forward were some of the problems facing the world, one of them is climate change, another is how are we going to feed our ever increasing population and how these problems gave going through my mind one Sunday afternoon I chanced upon a documentary on television titled The Secret of El Dorado and it told the story of a fantastic civilization that lived in the Amazon rainforest before the Europeans arrived but that had always existed.
biochar the oldest new thing you ve never heard of wae nelson tedxorlando
It's been a problem for people because the soil in the Amazon is so bad that there was no way they could have grown enough food to feed this population that had lived there and then they started finding areas of rich soil in some places where They just were. small one acre two acres in the same places, they are over a hundred acres or more and they shared two characteristics, one of those characteristics is that they were very dark in color and the second was that they were obviously man made, this raised a new question . delight and that's how these people were able to take this land and turn it into that and when that saw was examined, it was discovered that the magic element was simply coal, ordinary coal, a coal was made by a process called pyrolysis.
biochar the oldest new thing you ve never heard of wae nelson tedxorlando

More Interesting Facts About,

biochar the oldest new thing you ve never heard of wae nelson tedxorlando...

It simply means that you heat organic material in the absence of air and when you do that, all the volatile zar is expelled, all the gaseous parts are expelled and what is left is a solid material which is essentially pure carbon and which is now called charcoal when you look at the wood under a microscope, what you will see is that it is like our bodies, it is full of passages and channels to move fluids and if you really look closely you will see that there is actually more open area than solid area. all the material there, so when you make charcoal from wood or other organic materials like wood, all these passages remain as part of the structure of the charcoal in the form of pores and when you have a lot of pores you also have a lot of surface area, so example.
biochar the oldest new thing you ve never heard of wae nelson tedxorlando
It is estimated that one gram of carbon is a piece the size of a pencil eraser. One gram of coal has about 9,000 square feet of surface area. This little piece about the size of a pencil eraser, also, that surface on the charcoal tends to have a very slight electrical charge that helps attract

thing

s to the charcoal and settle on that surface when we put charcoal in the ground. It's called

biochar

. Now plants to grow well require three things besides sunlight to function well. One of them is that they need nutrients, they need water and any microorganism.
biochar the oldest new thing you ve never heard of wae nelson tedxorlando
When we amend the soil with biochar, something fantastic happens and that is that the biochar, with the mechanism that I talked about before, tends to suck the nutrients from the soil into the biochar, where it is stored for the plants when they need it, on top of that, because Because we have extracted nutrients from the soil, we have stored them in the biological system. When the rains arrive and filter through this soil, we no longer have contaminated water coming out. and pollutes our streams and rivers and also, because the nutrients are still stored, we don't have to keep adding fertilizer over and over again to make up for the amount of nutrients that are removed while all that is happening in the pores of the biochar.
They are filling with water, so you have a significant reserve of water that remains in the soil waiting for the dry times to arrive, but it is in the mini world of microorganisms where biochar really shines. Modern research has shown that microorganisms are very, very important for well-being. plants grow it's like finding a luxury condo when microbes meet biochar. This is a quote from Alan Alan Bates. This gives you an example of how much difference above and below no carbon can be made every time we add biochar to the soil. We found that there is a significant increase in both the quantity and the different varieties of microorganisms in the soil, which results in a very significant increase in the yield and well-being of the plants.
There is a man who is in a corn field without biochar and the field with corn with biochar, the next one will really show it, there are beans planted at the same time on the left, there is no biochar, on the right, biochar, and that is in five weeks, that slide is smooth, they are two farmers who are from Cameroon. and if you notice that in their right hand they are carrying a corn plant that has large roots and in their left hand a smaller plant, the one on the right was growing in soil modified with biochar and the one in the left hand did not have biochar if Take a look look at the farmer on the right, he seems pretty happy with his yield, that's the kind of benefits we get from biochar, so here we have all these benefits that Buy gives us for our crops and other plants that we grow, but here's a benefit totally different - we are getting plants to take CO2 from the air and use the process of photosynthesis to then produce the food and structural components that they need and when we make charcoal from that material, charcoal that is. there, like I said, it's basically pure carbon, its carbon that was in the atmosphere originally, biochar is the only effective economical way that we know of to remove CO2 from the air.
There are technologies touting its benefits as oh we can reduce the carbon footprint or we are carbon neutral biochar is carbon negative this is an amazing material and here we are back to square one voicing our concerns about the problems it will face the world in the future, but now we know that we have a new technology a technology that will help us manage these problems it is an old technology it is a mature technology we do not have to invest a huge amount of money and time in developing something new and then run the risk of failure what we have been making charcoal for over 5,000 years and it is scalable the developed world can build large plants and produce biochar on a massive, industrial scale, but it is produced just as effectively on a small scale subsistence farmers can produce biochar from ovens that they themselves have made from waste materials from their own communities, such as barrels, cans and bricks, these are three young ladies demonstrating the biochar oven that they built with a paint can, pizza can, sauce can pizza and a can of baked beans which lasts about 20 minutes and is a great biochar. performance, so yes, I am still worried about the future, but with that worry comes a new emotion and that emotion is hope.
Biochar is a new technology or an old technology made new again and that happens to be one of the tools we use. The need to solve our problems in the future is literally under our feet. Biochar has the potential to really improve our lives in the future and that is very good news for us, our children and especially our grandchildren. Oh, and did I mention biochar? Wonderful material.

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