Celebrate with biochar events in Pukekohe and Bombay on 27 and 28 April
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The new book by Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper has been getting rave reviews from inside and outside the international biochar community. I tried to buy online but the shipping costs more than double the price. I’ve been in touch with Kathleen and the book editor. It seems they are planning a print run in Australia in paper-back. I’ve told them that I will try to gather a bulk order for NZ to reduce the price. This could also end up being under the wing of BNNZ but this is still to be agreed.
Send me an email if you are interested in getting a copy via this route: trevor(at)soilcarbon.org.nz
This video is available from the Royal Society of NZ website. I provided notice of this on the ABE FB page back on 9 March 2018, as I was aware that Annette Cowie was a speaker and she has been very active in biochar research in Australia. Annette manages to squeeze in comments on biochar about 3 times (19min, 34min, 57min) but the the talk is well worth a watch, despite the many missed opportunities to discuss biochar in more depth.
Note that NZGRC were co-sponsor for the event. I’ve been critical about their (apparent lack of) interest in biochar. We need to keep waving a black flag but it seems no one is seeing it. We need to be standing on higher ground… which could be better (any!) coverage by NZ media and journalism. My hope lies in BNNZ attracting more resources and folk with time and energy.
We are on 7 hectares in Pukekohe, just south of Auckland, New Zealand. The property is a former kiwifruit orchard with a small woodlot in a gully at the rear of the property. Soils are highly productive and much of the area is devoted to vegetable production, especially potato, onion and brassicas.
We have planted a trial orchard of 50 avocado trees, variety Hass with Bacon pollinators. Because the soil bulk density is 1.0 and Avocados prefer lighter soil, we have used biochar to try and ‘lighten’ the soil and to improve drainage and biological activity. First the orchard was ploughed and then graded into berms, just off contour for drainage. A cover crop was grown until compost, gypsum and biochar were added to the soil and rotary hoed in. Satellite photos taken the day we rotary hoed the soil prior to planting show how dark the soil is now compared to our neighbours.
Trees were planted March 2018 and the soil mulched using rotted wood mulch from an arborist. They suffered in cold wet conditions for winter 2018 and some were grazed by escaped cattle, but the trees are now growing strongly as of Feb 2019. A few have their first fruit, but these have been taken off. We have begun to inter-plant with Tamarillo to fill the gaps until the avos get bigger and about half of the trial planting have done well, quarter have died and quarter are struggling. I put this down to weeds as they weren’t weeded when we were away for 6 weeks.
We continue to make biochar using an old bath. Timber that is too small or rotten for fire wood or otherwise useless gets used. Mostly it comes from thinning the woodlot and sawmill waste. The main criteria for me is it has to give a decent volume of char and not require much work to do it.
I get a bathtub full of char each time which goes into the chicken house. After a few months of adding char every few weeks, we shovel it out and either compost it or rotary hoe it into garden beds. We don’t plant directly into those beds for a while.
It is burning the enamel off the bath now after a few burns but is a handy size, easy to quench and more tolerant of wet wood etc. I have soaked the char in duck pond water as well which gets it going biologically. I have pretty much given up on the TLUD. Too much time cutting up timber to fit and I always forget it and return to a pile of ash.
The following press release will be circulated this week to various media publications in NZ. Your help with its circulation and dissemination would be appreciated.
PUTTING CARBON BACK INTO SOIL
In a world having too much carbon in the atmosphere and obsessed about expensive and dangerous technologies for it’s removal, it is comforting to know that a form of charcoal has now been accepted by the IPCC as a useful tool in the fight against climate change.
Biochar is charcoal which can be used to lift productivity in agriculture and as a long-lived carbon store in soils. It can be used to enhance water quality and as a bioremediation tool for contaminated soils. The production of biochar can also deliver secondary bioenergy benefits and deal with many types of ‘liability’ biomass. Biochar has attracted worldwide attention as a Negative Emissions Technology (NET) in the latest IPCC report, presented at COP24. Biochar has been identified as having positive impacts on 12 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
A growing number of New Zealand farmers are becoming interested in making and using Biochar, leading to a new organisation is being formed, Biochar Network New Zealand (BNNZ), which will have its Inaugural General Meeting in Pukekohe on 14 February.
BNNZ is planning to promote and support activities that provide widespread awareness, understanding and acceptance of Biochar in New Zealand, leading to a diverse range of production and application scenarios for the benefit of New Zealand’s agriculture, industry and environment.
The BNNZ IGM will take place at 10am on 14 February 2019 at the Reid Anderson Lounge, 18 Wesley Road, Pukekohe.
If you wish to attend, or participate via remote access, please email your request to: BNNZ@soilcarbon.org.nz
For more information about biochar please see:
https://soilcarbon.org.nz/biochar-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter/
Plans for the Inaugural General Meeting of Biochar Network New Zealand are progressing. The IGM will take place on 14 February 2019 in Pukekohe. Live streaming technology will be used to allow folk from around the country to attend the meeting remotely. All attendees (physical or remote) will be required to preregister so that we can adequately cater for numbers.
A press release is being prepared and, as part of this, a ‘BNNZ Mission Statement’ may be helpful. Your comments or alternative text on the draft below would be appreciated…
BNNZ: promote and support activities leading to widespread awareness, understanding and acceptance of biochar in New Zealand, leading to a diverse range of production and application scenarios for the benefit of New Zealand’s agriculture, industry and environment.
Insight into the effects of biochar on manure composting: Evidence supporting the relationship between N2O emission and denitrifying community(Article)
- aInstitute of Environmental Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou 310058, China
- bCallaghan Innovation Research Ltd, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, 8140, New Zealand
- cSchool of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang A and F University, Lin’an, Hangzhou 311300, China
Abstract
Although nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from composting contribute to the accelerated greenhouse effect, it is difficult to implement practical methods to mitigate these emissions. In this study, the effects of biochar amendment during pig manure composting were investigated to evaluate the inter-relationships between N2O emission and the abundance of denitrifying bacteria. Analytical results from two pilot composting treatments with (PWSB, pig manure + wood chips + sawdust + biochar) or without (PWS, pig manure + wood chips + sawdust) biochar (3% w/w) demonstrated that biochar amendment not only lowered NO2 –-N concentrations but also lowered the total N2O emissions from pig manure composting, especially during the later stages. Quantification of functional genes involved in denitrification and Spearman rank correlations matrix revealed that the N2O emission rates correlated with the abundance of nosZ, nirK, and nirS genes. Biochar-amended pig manure had a higher pH and a lower moisture content. Biochar amendment altered the abundance of denitrifying bacteria significantly; less N2O-producing and more N2O-consuming bacteria were present in the PWSB, and this significantly lowered N2O emissions in the maturation phase. Together, the results demonstrate that biochar amendment could be a novel greenhouse gas mitigation strategy during pig manure composting.
A thoughtful new essay on climate change… and a mention on biochar.
Peter has a long history with biochar in NZ, dating back (at least) to the his 2007 paper ‘Biochar and bio-energy production for climate change mitigation‘ when he was with MAF. This paper is still quoted extensively in other research papers and is listed in the wikipedia references on biochar.
I’m no expert on the history of biochar interest in NZ, but I believe Peter was involved with early govt work that led to initial investment in NZBRC.
NZ connections to this study on P leaching. Check out older posts with the P tag… https://soilcarbon.org.nz/tag/phosphorus/
Conclusions
“The findings of this study indicate that P leached from organic arable soils can be greater than from mineral soils, and therefore, these organic soils require further investigation into reducing their P losses. Metal-enriched biochar, applied as an adsorptive layer below the topsoil, has the potential to reduce P losses from medium- to high-P organic soils but appear to be less useful in mineral soils.”
Investigating the Influence of Biochar Particle Size and Depth of Placement on Nitrous Oxide (N2O) Emissions from Simulated Urine Patches
Ainul Faizah Mahmud 1,2,*, Marta Camps-Arbestain 1 and Mike Hedley 1
1 New Zealand Biochar Research Centre, Massey University, Private Bag 11222, Palmerston North 4442,
New Zealand; M.Camps@massey.ac.nz (M.C.-A.); M.Hedley@massey.ac.nz (M.H.)
2 Department of Land Management, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
* Correspondence: A.F.Mahmud@massey.ac.nz or ainul_jpth@yahoo.com
Received: 30 September 2018; Accepted: 1 November 2018; Published: 7 November 2018
Abstract:
The use of biochar reduces nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from soils under specific conditions yet the mechanisms through which interactions occur are not fully understood. The objectives of this glasshouse study were to investigate the effect of (i) biochar particle size, and (ii) the impact of soil inversion—through simulated mouldboard ploughing—on N2O emissions from soils to which cattle urine was applied. Pine biochar (550 C) with two different particle sizes (<2 mm and >4 mm) was mixed either into the top soil layer at the original 0–10 cm depth in the soil column or at 10–20 cm depth by inverting the top soil to simulate ploughing. Nitrous oxide emissions were monitored for every two to three days, up to seven weeks during the summer trial and measurements were repeated during the autumn trial. We found that the use of large particle size biochar in the inverted soil had significant impact on increasing the cumulative N2O emissions in autumn trial, possibly through changes in the water hydraulic conductivity of the soil column and increased water retention at the boundary between soil layers. This study thus highlights the importance of the role of biochar particle size and the method of biochar placement on soil physical properties and the implications of these on N2O emissions.