Posts under ‘BioChar’

After some thought and some research, I’ve changed my mind about buying lump charcoal. It really isn’t that hard to make your own but there are some “start-up” costs involved. Humans have been making charcoal for thousands of years and it is likely that the dark soils known as terra preta in the Amazon (and [...]

Biochar, as I wrote in the previous post, is identical to charcoal, at least when viewed under a microscope. What is different about biochar is that to be called that by the International Biochar Intiative, it must be used as a soil amendment for agricultural or environmental gain. As I wrote in the last post, [...]

Erich Knight, who commented on my previous post in great detail, supplied some further resources to read and study so that I could better understand this phenomenon called biochar. The first question that I had was really basic: what is biochar? Well, it isn’t terra preta (terra preta is an Amazonian soil that has high [...]

Several years ago, I read an article on something called terra preta. Intrigued, I looked for information out on the Internet and found very little, other than the fact that terra preta is Portuguese for “dark earth” and that the pre-historic inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest had manufactured it and used it as a [...]