Our Green Streets Blog

It is high time to begin learning more about the benefits biochar might provide to all of us living on this planet, especially when considering the agricultural practice from South America is over twenty centuries old.

According to the Internationasl Biochar Initiative, sustainable biochar is a “powerfully simple tool fight global warming.”

“Sustainable biochar is one of the few technologies that is relatively inexpensive, widely applicable, and quickly scalable. IBI focuses on the need for quality and sustainability standards and assurances in the emerging biochar industry,” the website reports.

South America: students with biochar stoves Source: Biochar Initiative

For those wondering what kind of new invention bichar might be,  it is not new at all. The practice has been around for almost 2,000 years, where it was practiced in South America. The product, called terra preta, or “dark earth” that converts agricultural waste into a soil enhancer, or fertilizing agent.  But beyond acting as a soil enhancer, proponents claim biochar has the capacity to hold carbon. It is being produced in the United States, South America, and Australia, to name a few producing locations.

Biochar is a charcoal produced under high temperatures, using crop waste, animal manure, and other organic waste.

According to Kelsi Bracmort, an analyst in agricultural conservation and natural resources policy, “The combined production and use of biochar is considered a carbon-negative process, meaning that it removes carbon from the atmosphere.”

Take a thorough look, we shall be reporting far more on this product.

Praise for Ghanaian micro business

Weeds rarely are welcome in the garden soil. Getting rid of them is normally an arduous procedure with more bad sides than good sides, including blisters, aching backs, and time passed, which might have been better spent elsewhere. The one good side from weeding is probably the dead-tired, ‘sweat on your brow’ reward of seeing your garden rid of the unwelcome invasion.

Ghanaian villagers strip bark from invasive weed tree so it can be used for erosion control. Photo: G. Meyers

But if you’re an itinerant farmer in Ghana, living near the Brong Ahafo gold mine of Newmont Ghana Gold Limited, one weed features another good side: it is being converted into a cash crop.

This weed, called Broussonetia papyrifera, or York, can consume arable land in a short time, growing 25-meter trees and a system of seeds and shoots that turns food-producing areas into wastelands.  Ghanaians may once have called it Devil’s Teak, now they see it as a raw material that can bring income to the villagers of Techeyre, who operate a micro business making biodegradable matting that is used for erosion control and slope stabilization at the nearby mining operation.

This micro business jute mat operation was conceived by Muhammad Bin Abubakar, an outspoken Newmont nursery manager who has left behind a large trail of good work, including growing a shaded forest where once there were only mining tailings. Bin, as he is known, says he learned of a way to use the tree when he worked at Newmont’s Indonesian operations.  According to Bin, one farmer, Amoafo Darkwah had to abandon his family’s two-acre cassava farm because of York infestation.

Project developer, Bin Abubakar, works with village members. Photo: G. Meyers

In the village of Techeyre, some 800 people, including Darkwah, join in stripping bark from these trees.  Bark stripped, the trees die within two weeks and will stop producing seeds. The dead timber can be used for minor construction needs or for cooking fuel, and much of the sawdust is used for growing at Bin’s nursery.

Then it’s time to treat the moneymaker, the bark. The fibrous material, taken from the bottom part of the tree, measures an average of one meter by five meters. This solid piece is first hammered flat so the fibrous structure can be pulled out, or woven into a continuous net material. The hammering process, where large hand-hewn mallets are used, resonates throughout the village with the sound of drums.

As Bin describes it, “ The mat is then woven into a mesh, just like chicken mesh, thus giving it the ability to trap eroded soil particles during storm periods.”

Beyond the environmental functionality of the jute mats, there is the micro business that has provided income for some 800 people where money or paying work are as scarce as the York is plentiful.

The difficulties posed by the York have been transformed into a solution, says Bin.

“So the jute mats are used for controlling erosion in our mining areas. Which now accounts for 800 people – ladies, men, and students in this area. And they are getting their livelihood from this work.”

We hope more micro businesses such as this one Bin has started begin popping up across Africa and other developing areas of the planet.

Note: This opinion on sustainability is submitted by guest writer, Bevan Suits, founder of Access to Aquaponics (http://accesstoaquaponics.com/).

Sustainability is a state of balance. We see it in nature every day but we don’t notice it until something goes haywire. Take the Dust Bowl for example. In the early 1900s, cattle ranching across the Great Plains began to be replaced by cultivation. With new efficient technologies, farmers were able to plow vast areas of virgin prairie. They didn’t realize that the grass was essential to the ecosystem. The grass and twelve inches of topsoil was a skin that held in place the soil and moisture below. Removing it was preparation for a huge disaster. Erosion began to wash the soil away and all of the nutrients with it.

Beginning in 1930, drought allowed the soil to become dry dust. Over the next few years, a series of windstorms took the dust to the skies and the US experienced an ecological and economic catastrophe. Millions of tons of soil darkened the skies of the eastern US all the way to New England. In some areas of the Great Plains, day was turned to night by the “black blizzards” that reduced visibility to inches, destroying a way of life and an ecosystem only inches in depth.

This was perhaps our first hard lesson in sustainability. The US government stepped in to promote better farming methods and work on rehabilitating the land. The big word then was not sustainability but conservation.

We experienced on a very large scale how new, powerful farming technology, and the desire for profit, tipped the scales toward imbalance, with disastrous results for economy and ecology. This lesson did sink in, but not much beyond better ways to plow. Grass was still just grass.

Sustainability exists all around us in the ecology and the economy. It is a state of balance that is ordinary and invisible. We don’t appreciate it until things big things fall apart. In the fall of 2008, the economy was in a “free fall”. We were looking for the “bottom”, another way of saying sustainability. It seems to have leveled out, but we are reminded that our man-made economy follows natural laws of balance, and we seem to have a lot to learn.

Only 80 years after the Dust Bowl, we’re pressured to think and act smarter. We are smarter, but the question is this: “Who is driving?” Unfortunately, it’s too often the corporate mind-set that values short-term profit over long-term sustainable returns, which includes profit along with quality of life benefits.  The concept of just enough is spun into anti-business.

Our economic condition is our latest lesson on sustainability. Hopefully we are gaining a larger awareness of how things are connected that will help us make better decisions. This awareness is what’s behind the interest in local food, a building block of economics that has been lost. The interest in local food drives the interest in aquaponics, a technology that grows fish and vegetables in the same system. It has the capacity to deliver a lot of food quickly in a small space.

If you consider the history of agricultural technology, it’s all been about cultivating increasing acreage with greater efficiency. Aquaponics breaks the mold and provides a solution based on concentrated yields in portable or fixed containers. It’s a scalable system that can be delivered and installed most anywhere at a very low cost.

Aquaponics is sustainable technology that doesn’t seem to have a downside. It has a lot to teach. May I suggest it is worth your time to look into it.