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Terralogix Group: Biochar Soil Restoration

Biochar Definition:
Charcoal created from Pyrolysis used as a soil amendment

Biochar Produces
- Carbon sequestration
- Mitigation of climate change
- Long-term soil restoration
- Pollutant filtration

TerraLogix
Biochar: carbon sequestration

Biochar is almost all carbon. You put it into the soil and it stays there for a millennium.

Alec MacLeod, COO, TerraLogix Group, LLC

This is demonstrated by the existence of soils down in South America called Terra Preta, which is Portuguese for dark earth. The people who were living there at that time would build large, covered fires and essentially make charcoal. Then they'd incorporate that into the soil. It's been four or five thousand years. That soil is so valuable it's being mined and sold in garden centers.

Let's look at the contrast. Let's consider a cornfield that we have even here in Massachusetts. This field 's been farmed for a long time. Part of it is largely gone. so now you're putting in the commercial fertilizers and so on. You have essentially, no longer a carbon based system. You're no longer relying on soil nutrients, or the whole microorganism relationship with plants that's so important in getting the soils mineral nutrients into the plant.

In contrast, when you take biochar, and you put that in the soil, the biochar itself has a vast surface area. A huge pore volume. What that does is it fosters the growth and development of a very healthy microbial system. It also provides organic material itself as they live and die. They're attracted to worms. The worms come up and they leave their castings. Now you have a carbon cycle that's operating,

The carbon comes into the plant, becomes produce of one sort or another. Passes through the animal, is captured in biochar and is put back into the soil. That's a subtraction of carbon from the atmosphere.



Kurt Karsten, CEO, TerraLogix

When you put carbon back into the soil as a soil amendment, you essentially re-carbonize the soil and carbon has an essential carbon with hydrogen, is an essential component in a healthy top soil.


Biochar:
- Soil amendment
- Increase crop yield
- Decrease use of fertilizer
- Decrease use of water
- Replenishes carbon
- Reclaims soil

We are very active in the concept of showing people the beneficial effects of biochar as an agricultural support system as a soil amendment. Has tremendous amount of capability to increase crop yield, decrease the use of fertilizer, decrease the use of water. There are number of ways that it can be used in existing circumstances to solve problems such as the decarbonization of soil in certain agricultural communities. We can take biochar and mix it with ... we can mix it with dreadge spoil material and reclaim that soil.


Studies have shown that you reduce the need nitrogen phosphorus fertilizer component by about 40 to 45% and you also reduce the need for water on those crop situations by 20 to 25%. And from a farmer's perspective, those marginal improvements make a huge difference

Scott Graves, CMO, TerraLogix Group, LLC

The way that we farm has allowed us as a society to grow into a modern, civilized society around the world. It has had its consequences. One of those big consequences has been to deplete soils. In the last 80 to 90 years post World War One, we've increasingly used chemical fertilization as the main way to get nutrients into the soil, albeit temporarily, so that we can grow crops on a mass scale, and support the population that has ever increased.

It's not sustainable because some of the products in NPK fertilization are mined like phosphorus and they're depleting.

Let us not forget that on top of everything we've mentioned that is both useful and friendlier to the environment in our process, but we're also talking about large amounts of carbon being sequestered for tens of thousands of years in the biochar. We're putting that back into the earth and by all estimates, charcoal, biochar, can hold on to that carbon, large amounts of carbon for thousands and thousands of years.

That's important to get that carbon out of the atmosphere where it's not only not useful to us in the quantities in which it is now, but it's actually a detriment to human society and all animals on earth. Why not put it back into the soil where it's most useful for our trees, for our other shrubbery, for our vegetative plants which we need for crops for food? That's where the carbon needs to be and this is a process that puts it back.

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