TP Humor, Poems, Prose & Wit

[erich]

Biochar Rap

 

 

 

Here's the 'Clock is Tickin' ....hope you enjoy

 

Don

 

Clock is Tickin' (Bio-Char rap funk blues)

Words by: Don Steck, Tracy Rush, Erich Knight

Music by: Tracy Rush, Don Steck, Frank Skavenski

 

“Time is running out…the clock is tickin‘ ” (4x)

Let’s get it together for the earth takes a lickin’

Waitin’ for the day we can join the great circle

The web of life,…. Become part of the cycle

Time is runnin’ out .. The clock is tickin; (4x)

Let’s get it together for the earth takes a lickin’

 

The Kayapo Indians, they had to learn

To slash and char, not slash and burn

Put it in poor soils to make ‘em rich

Grew food for centuries without a hitch

They called it terra preta which means black earth

Puts life in the soil like organic birth

Lookin’ for an answer, but it’s not very far

It’s in the black earth called bio-char

 

“Time is running out… the clock is tickin’”(8x)

 

Now the char is full of tiny pores

That make carbon cribs for the bugs and spores

The fungal roots form an interstate

That helps all the plants to communicate

This web of life is so complete

That everyone’s got good food to eat

Puttin’ it back from where it came

The answers always been the same

 

“Time is runnin’ out…the clock is tickin” (8x)

(instrument solo for 8 bars)

 

We broke the circle with the smokestack lightenin’

And what happens next could be kinda frightenin’

We’re puttin’ too much carbon into the air

It’s makin’ it hotter everywhere

The ice caps are meltin’ and the sea levels risin’

We’re puttin’ too much carbon in the sky’s horizon

We gotta change our ways before it’s too late

Save Mother Earth from this horrible fate

 

“Time is runnin’ out…and the clock is tickin’”(8x)

Now modern man won’t have to work so hard

We can learn from the past how to fuel our cars

We’ll feed the earth… while we drive

Keepin’ that soil food web alive

The farmers be so happy and so’s the man

Cause the fuels be flowin’ and the carbon’s canned

The people‘ll be so happy near and far

Cause of good cheap food from bio-char

 

Time is runnin’ out…the clock is tickin’ (8x)

(instrument solo for 8 bars)

 

Take waste from the cities, organic and such

Waste from the farms…don’t make it mulch

Fire it up in the bio-char grill

Cause listen up people there’s no time to kill

We’ll keep it in the ground not in the air

Bio-chars the answer and it’s been right there

The irony to me I see....

Is that we learned it from our own history

 

Time is runnin’ out… the clock is tickin(8x)

Let’s get it together, for the earth takes a lickin’

Waitin’ for the day we can join the great circle

The web of life.. become part of the cycle

Time is runnin’ out… the clock is tickin’ (8x)

 

I can't get the mp3 file to up load.

any help, email me at

and I'll sent it.

Thanks

Erich

[freeztar]

Erich,

 

I removed your email address from the previous post to protect your email from spambots. It's generally not wise to post your email address online as it only invites lots of spam. Instead, ask people to send you a private message through Hypography. It's much safer.

 

The song has cool lyrics, I'd like to hear it. You can use a service like fileden.com to upload the file for free. It gives you a link you can paste here (or anywhere) so everyone can hear it. (it's good for pics and video or whatever as well)

[erich]

OK

Here she be

 

Clock is Ticken

 

 

http://www.fileden.com/getfile.php?file_path=http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/6/4/2465941/Clock%20Is%20Ticking.mp3

 

Erich

[freeztar]

Sweet! :confused:

[erich]

The poor farmer grows weeds

The fair farmer grows crops

The Good farmer grows Soil

The Poor farmer quote came from "Gardening at the Dragon's Gate" by Wendy Johnson

She said it was a Japanese folk saying

 

On the Biochar list, some folks started doing limerick riffs off it;

 

There was a poor farmer grew weeds

Till biochar men of good deeds

Said fair farmers grow crops

But good farmers are tops

They put black stuff in t'soil with their seeds

 

not a very good one but a limerick if you want it

Peter Read

 

 

There once were three farmers of Leeds

The poorest grew nothing but weeds

Another grew crops,

But the man who was tops

Grew his soil with char, then sowed seeds.

 

TJ

 

 

There once was a man from Bombay

Who tried to grow stuff in the clay.

He tried Biochar,

'Twas better by far!

"For me, this will be, the new way."

 

Kevin

[erich]

Prof Ian Lowe's Poem to Biochar

Submitted by thayer on Wed, 07/15/2009 - 12:25

Date:

Wed, 07/15/2009

Contributor:

Thayer Tomlinson

 

Taken from Dr. Lowe's address to the 1st Asia-Pacific Biochar Conference, Gold Coast, May 2009.

 

 

1. Here’s a summary of my talk

In case you slept or took a walk

We know our civilisation’s through

If we don’t cut back on CO2.

 

2. It won’t matter how we toil

If we don’t put carbon in our soil

And so the future’s shining star

Yes, you’ve guessed it, Biochar!

 

3. I’ll just remind you, climate changes

Threaten clear and present dangers

We know we have no future here

Unless we fix the atmosphere.

 

4. Clean energy will have a role

But fixing carbon is out goal

No matter who or where you are

Let’s raise a glass to Biochar!

 

 

Prof Ian Lowe's Poem to Biochar | International Biochar Initiative

[erich]

A dream I've had for years ( see Paraphrased speech below ) to base the coming carbon economy firmly on the foundation of top soils. My read of the agronomic history of civilization shows that the Kayopo Amazon Indians and the Egyptians were the only ones to maintain fertility for the long haul, millennium scales. Egypt has now forsaken their geologic advantage by building the Aswan dam, and are stuck, with the rest of us, in the soil C mining, NPK rat race to the bottom.

 

The Ag Soil Carbon standard is in the second phase of review by the AMS / ARC branch at USDA.

After initial review, approval is expected in this month. Contact Gary Delong . Novecta - Charting a New Direction in Agriculture 515-334-7305 office

Read over the work so far;

http://www.novecta.com/documents/Carbon-Standard.pdf

 

In my efforts to have Biochar included I have recruited several to join the list, briefed the entire committee about char when issues concerning N2O & CH4 soil GHG emissions were raised, fully briefed a couple members when they replied individually to my "Reply all" briefs.

 

 

Soil Carbon Commandments:

 

1) Thou shalt not have any other Molecule before Me

 

2) Thou shall not make wrongful use of the name of Biochar, It will not acquit anyone who mis-charactorizes it's name

 

3) Observe the Fallow days and keep them, as Sustainability commands thou

 

4) Honor your Micro Flora & Fauna , as the Soil Carbon commands you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that High Soil Carbon has given you.

 

5) Thou shall not murder the Soil Food Web

 

6) Neither shall thou adulterate the Soils with Toxicity

 

7) Neither shall thou steal Biomass from the Soil Food Web

 

8) Neither shall thou bear false witness against your neighbors Biochar, or about Thy own

 

9) Neither shall thou covet your neighbor's Fertility

 

10) Neither shall thou desire your neighbor's house, or field, or Pyrolysis Reactor, or farm implements, or anything that belongs to your neighbor, as thou may Create thy Own

 

 

Soil Carbon Dream

 

I have a dream that one day we live in a nation where progress will not be judged by the production yields of our fields, but by the color of their soils and by the Carbon content of their character.

 

I have a dream today.

 

I have a dream that one day, a suite of earth sensing satellites will level the playing field, giving every farmer a full account of carbon he sequesters. That Soil Carbon is given as the final arbiter, the common currency, accountant and Judge of Stewardship on our lands.

 

I have a dream today.

 

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made forest, the rough soils will be made fertile, and the crooked Carbon Marketeers will be made straight, and the glory of Soil Sequestration shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see a Mutually assured Sustainability.

 

This is our hope.

 

My apologies to Dr. King, but I think he would understand my passion

Erich

[lemit]

As I suspected, this thread seems to be full of, well, earthy humor.

[erich]

I have reviewed this Book

It is a BLOCK BUSTER

New Genetic / demographic data, Archeological / Paleoclimate data that leaves your jaw on the floor.

The missing pieces of Anthropogenic Climate Change fall into perfect order.

Albert puts you in the canoes, fearing the next woman warrior attack or wondrous visions

of plenty.

Cutting edge Satellite research

Big, medium & small scale, here there and everywhere.

The Mantria Story; Inside out and Outside In

 

Want more?, it is There, I've just tipped this Iceberg.

Can't say enough,

Erich

 

 

From Albert:

New Society is offering 20% off on The Biochar Solution for pre-pub orders (before Sep 15). They also have an Affiliate Program.

 

Any orders clicked through get a 15% commission for the business, and after those commissions reach $25, NSP will mail the business a check. This works well for the business and works well for the author (higher royalties.) If you are interested, please contact our webmaster Paul O'Sullivan at [email protected] and he will set it up for you.

 

cheers,

Albert

 

PS: Here is a short promo blurb if it would be helpful:

 

 

The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change

Albert Bates

Civilization as we know it is at a crossroads. For the past 10,000 years, we have turned a growing understanding of physics, chemistry and biology to our advantage in producing more energy and more food and as a consequence have produced exponential population surges, resource depletion, ocean acidification, desertification and climate change.

 

The path we are following began with long-ago discoveries in agriculture, but it divided into two branches, about 8,000 years ago. The branch we have been following for the most part is conventional farming - irrigation, tilling the soil, and removing weeds and pests. That branch has degraded soil carbon levels by as much as 80 percent in most of the world's breadbaskets, sending all that carbon skyward with each pass of the plow.

 

The other branch disappeared from our view some 500 years ago, although archaeologists are starting to pick up its trail now. At one time it achieved success as great as the agriculture that we know, producing exponential population surges and great cities, but all that was lost in a fluke historical event borne of a single genetic quirk.

 

It vanished when European and Asian diseases arrived in the Americas.

 

From excavations on the banks of the Amazon river, clearings of the savanna/gallery forests in the Upper Xingu, and ethnographic studies of Mesoamerican milpas, science has now re-traced the path of the second great agriculture, and, to its astonishment, found it more sustainable and productive that what we are currently pursuing.

While conventional agriculture leads to deserts, blowing parched dirt across the globe and melting ice caps, this other, older style, brings fertile soils, plant and animal diversity and birdsong. While the agriculture we use has been shifting Earth's carbon balance from soil and living vegetation to atmosphere and ocean, the agriculture that was nearly lost moves carbon from sky to soil and crops. The needed shift, once embarked upon, can be profound and immediate. We could once more become a garden planet, with deep black earths and forests of fruit and nuts where deserts now stand. We can heal our atmosphere and oceans.

 

Come along on this journey of rediscovery with The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change.

Albert Bates teaches permaculture and appropriate technology and has written several books on energy and the environment including The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook.

 

6x9"/208 pp

Technology & Engineering /

Agriculture/Sustainable Agriculture

PB ISBN:978-0-86571-677-3

Price: US/Can $17.95

[Vox]

Turtle: Hey Mom; did you hear about the new terra preta enthusiast who used a fired-clay brick to hammer their charcoal into bits?

 

Mother Nature: No Turtle; how'd that work out?

 

Turtle: Well, it broke up the charcoal just fine, but the enthusiast got some bad cuts on the hands trying to pick out the clay shards.

:)

 

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

:hihi:

[Essay]

I have reviewed this Book

It is a BLOCK BUSTER

New Genetic / demographic data, Archeological / Paleoclimate data that leaves your jaw on the floor.

The missing pieces of Anthropogenic Climate Change fall into perfect order.

Albert puts you in the canoes, fearing the next woman warrior attack or wondrous visions

of plenty.

Cutting edge Satellite research

Big, medium & small scale, here there and everywhere.

The Mantria Story; Inside out and Outside In

 

Want more?, it is There, I've just tipped this Iceberg.

Can't say enough,

Erich

 

 

From Albert:

New Society is offering 20% off on The Biochar Solution for pre-pub orders (before Sep 15). They also have an Affiliate Program.

 

Any orders clicked through get a 15% commission for the business, and after those commissions reach $25, NSP will mail the business a check. This works well for the business and works well for the author (higher royalties.) If you are interested, please contact our webmaster Paul O'Sullivan at [email protected] and he will set it up for you.

 

cheers,

Albert

 

PS: Here is a short promo blurb if it would be helpful:

 

 

The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change

Albert Bates

Civilization as we know it is at a crossroads. For the past 10,000 years, we have turned a growing understanding of physics, chemistry and biology to our advantage in producing more energy and more food and as a consequence have produced exponential population surges, resource depletion, ocean acidification, desertification and climate change.

 

The path we are following began with long-ago discoveries in agriculture, but it divided into two branches, about 8,000 years ago. The branch we have been following for the most part is conventional farming - irrigation, tilling the soil, and removing weeds and pests. That branch has degraded soil carbon levels by as much as 80 percent in most of the world's breadbaskets, sending all that carbon skyward with each pass of the plow.

 

The other branch disappeared from our view some 500 years ago, although archaeologists are starting to pick up its trail now. At one time it achieved success as great as the agriculture that we know, producing exponential population surges and great cities, but all that was lost in a fluke historical event borne of a single genetic quirk.

 

It vanished when European and Asian diseases arrived in the Americas.

 

From excavations on the banks of the Amazon river, clearings of the savanna/gallery forests in the Upper Xingu, and ethnographic studies of Mesoamerican milpas, science has now re-traced the path of the second great agriculture, and, to its astonishment, found it more sustainable and productive that what we are currently pursuing.

While conventional agriculture leads to deserts, blowing parched dirt across the globe and melting ice caps, this other, older style, brings fertile soils, plant and animal diversity and birdsong. While the agriculture we use has been shifting Earth's carbon balance from soil and living vegetation to atmosphere and ocean, the agriculture that was nearly lost moves carbon from sky to soil and crops. The needed shift, once embarked upon, can be profound and immediate. We could once more become a garden planet, with deep black earths and forests of fruit and nuts where deserts now stand. We can heal our atmosphere and oceans.

 

Come along on this journey of rediscovery with The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change.

Albert Bates teaches permaculture and appropriate technology and has written several books on energy and the environment including The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook.

 

6x9"/208 pp

Technology & Engineering /

Agriculture/Sustainable Agriculture

PB ISBN:978-0-86571-677-3

Price: US/Can $17.95

 

 

Thanks Erich,

 

I'm looking forward to that!

...and thanks for the Biochar Conference updates too!

===

 

I just finished a book about SOIL last week. This should be required reading for all Americans. Finally all of American History makes sense to me. I wish I'd had this book taught to me in highschool, because then all the stuff I learned about history would have fit neatly into the big picture. Industrialization, capitalism, and our economy (& even wars) are fit neatly into that bigger picture too, finally putting them in perspective with reality.

 

Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America by Steven Stoll (2002).

 

So this book starts soon after the Constitution is adopted, and the agricultural productivity of the original 13 colonies is rapidly failing... and goes up to Rodale and organic farming... so it is comprehensive. But the focus on the 19th century is understandable, as that is where all the problems crop up (no pun intended) and where all the attempts at solutions end up determining the course of our history.

 

The big picture: From the North or from the South, and from the East to the West of America, all the perspectives finally fit into a cohesive whole picture.

 

So this is how we got here (you can say, after reading Stoll's book). And this is within a larger context of 10,000 years of agriculture too. It's amazing to see how close we came to "discovering" a sustainable system even here during our short history. But except for a few isolated groups, finding a path to adopting sustainability has been continually thwarted. And coping with those failings drove so much of our history and social change. We can only keep trying for the future, to find a pathway of stability.... The singularity is near!

 

I think it's important to realize that we are not the first to see the error of our unsustainable ways, and this book

fills in that very important background. I think it also provides a perspective that will empower today's proponents of sustainability. This is not a new struggle!

 

{A few of my favorite highlights from Larding the Lean Earth}

 

Stoll tells how a soil scientist named Hilgard, hired in ~1850 to find valuable minerals in Mississippi, spoke during Reconstruction to cotton farmers who had emigrated there decades earlier when they had worn out their lands to the east. Hilgard spoke:

 

"Well might the Chickasaws and Choctaws question the moral right of the act by which their beautiful, park-like hunting grounds were turned over to another race, on the plea that they did not put them to the uses for which the Creator intended them.... Under their system these lands would have lasted forever; under ours, as heretofore practiced, in less than a century more the State would be reduced to the condition of the Roman Campagna." -p.203

The trail of tears keeps flowing....

 

Even before the Civil War, in 1851, editors of an agricultural publication called "Soil of the South" noted:

"We are reaching a crisis, where the basis upon which all this great and glorious structure rests, is about to perish. The soil of the South... is being rapidly impoverished." -p.202

 

Growing up in Virginia, I'd always thought that our "Georgia Red Clay" had been the natural topsoil of the Southeast since the time of the dinosaurs, but I guess its only been a problem for less than 200 years.

 

The editors continued:

"Our old lands are worn out, our new ones are going. Gullies and red hill, and pines and broom sedge, tell now, where once was many a fertile plain."

&

"Men not yet old, will note in the brief history of their own recollection, how the wilderness has fallen, and the gullies and barren hillsides have multiplied, under the constant wear and tear of a system of culture which has abstracted all, and returned nothing to the earth." -p.202

 

...and then later we lost another ~500 tons of topsoil/acre during the Dustbowl too!

===

 

But at about the same time, some Eastern farmers were trying to restore their soils (instead of giving up and moving west). Just look at the title of this citation that Stoll uses: "An Address on the Opposite Results of Exhausting and Fertilizing Systems of Agriculture" from 1852. Also cited from the same author, Edmund Ruffin, comes a description of one restorative system in North Carolina's Edgecombe County. Stoll writes about how Ruffin described the annual soil amendment process, when the planters "made a mash by selecting from a menu of ingredients: earth, marl, ashes, barnyard dung, cottenseed, salt, and guano.... Slaves gathered dead trees and drift logs and burned them slowly to keep the ashes from flying." -p.154

Hey! If they were burning "slowly," then biochar was probably produced also!

 

Ruffin, who was an editor of the "Farmers' Register," also described the results of using the "composed manure" made by the Edgecombe system, writing: "Increased products and profits have been made on lands cropped almost every year... and without any thing like a rotation of crops. Cotton occupies the same ground almost continually, and always for at least four or five years in close succession." -p.154

===

 

Yep, that sounds like the typical benefits of biochar to me....

 

~

[erich]

More reviews of;

The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change

 

 

Reading like a detective story and marked by impressive scholarship, Albert Bates' latest book has placed the biochar solution and the vision of a truly regenerative agriculture and settlement squarely in the center of the global crisis. New historical evidence that climate is remarkably responsive to human impacts had me gripping the edge of my seat. The comprehensive and well-informed review of current initiatives and technologies is a tour-de-force, and the grasp of the global policy debate equally sobering. It is hard to imagine a technical subject-compounded of organic chemistry, archeology, rural economics, climate science, and microbiology-presented with greater drama or clarity.

 

 

-Peter Bane

 

Permaculture Activist

 

[erich]

The Biochar Revolution

http://biochar-books.com/The_Biochar_Revolution

 

Review: The Biochar Revolution: Transforming Agriculture and Environment, ed. Paul Taylor

 

The General rule covering emerging technology, that the "Latest book is the best book" is obfuscated by both the near simultaneous publication of The Biochar Revolution with The Biochar Solution and the complementary content of each work.

 

The Biochar Revolution reads like a encyclopedic companion and testimonial.

Dr. Taylor has the best people in academia & industry, as well as the grassroots, hands-on journeymen, as authors. Their personal travails and triumphs in development and applications of biochar soil technologies are inspiring. In the collaborative traditions of Astrophysics, Dr. Taylor's day job, these authoritative innovators allow you to view this cohesive whole system of sustainable carbon management.

 

The Australians are years ahead in broad field trials with many crops and in addition, have conservative political support of soil carbon sequestration. Paul opens a window on their consistent findings of increased yields, nutrient efficiency and major reductions in soil green house gas emissions.

 

Dr. Taylor has focused his cosmic perspective to the crisis our carbon based life has created with the mis-allocation of carbon. He lays out a path for carbon's re-allocation that garners high agricultural yields, biofuels, and generous climate dividends.

 

For the backyard shade tree mechanic to the sustainable energy entrepreneur, important lessons can be learned here. Simple to complex testing of biochars and soils, biological conditioning and formulations of chars are explained along with small scale home made pyrolitic cook stoves. The attention to the menagerie of clean biomass cook stoves for the developing world is prescient of the recent state department, CDC & DOE support of the UN Global Clean Stove Initiative for 100 million stoves.

 

Since carbon is the center of life , this work holds interest for everyone.

 

Erich J. Knight

Chairman; Markets and Business Committee

2010 US BiocharConference, at Iowa State University

 

 

 

 

The Biochar Revolution

http://biochar-books.com/The_Biochar_Revolution

 

Review: The Biochar Revolution: Transforming Agriculture and Environment, ed. Paul Taylor

I want to call this book: “Biochar, the Missing Manual.”

This compendium of practical how-to articles on the art and science of biochar bridges the current gap between research and implementation of biochar systems. While basic research on the mechanisms of biochar-soil interactions proceeds at research institutions around the globe, farmers, blacksmiths, colliers and crafty inventors of all sorts have jumped into the business of biochar production and utilization. The Biochar Revolution collects the results and best practical advice that these entrepreneurs have to offer to the biochar community.

In the book you will read about the challenges of designing low-emissions biochar production systems from small-scale stoves to farm-scale pyrolyzers. Another section of the book is devoted to explaining simple tests to characterize biochar and methods for conducting valid field trials. Biochar producers show how they add minerals and nutrients to maximize the effectiveness of biochar, and seasoned biochar business operators share the rudiments of their business plans including information on feedstocks, flow rates and financing.

Because biochar is rooted in an ancient, proven practice, farmers feel empowered to experiment and are beginning to accumulate and document their results. But because biochar is new to science, it is not always possible to account for these results in a predictable fashion. We are fortunate to have a vibrant, grassroots movement of biochar practitioners who are so generous in sharing their results with us. When practice and theory advance to the point where they meet in the middle, then we will truly see a biochar revolution.

 

-Kelpie Wilson, author, journalist and IBI Communications Editor