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Hexagonal Micro Structures for Planetary Prosperity – Unveiling the Secrets of Biochar with Kelpie Wilson
What do Justus Liebig, Pyrolysis, Cation Exchange Capacity, Carbon Nanotubes, the Black Madonna, and Hexagonal Micro Structures with Eight Allotropes have to do with each other? They’re all related to biochar – a simple, easy-to-make form of charcoal with special properties that enhance carbon sequestration, water retention, soil fertility, and enable greater nutrient density, food security, and even climate stabilization. At the molecular level, biochar exhibits extraordinary geometric structures – some might recognize “sacred” geometric structures – that are known to amplify the ionic and electric capacity of the soil and the life-giving forces of nature’s alchemy. In this special podcast episode, Kelpie Wilson, the author of The Biochar Handbook: A Practical Guide to Making and Using Bioactivated Charcoal (a book from Chelsea Green Publishing), provides a vast array of insights, knowledge, wisdom, how-to advice, and recommendations for each of us to incorporate more biochar in our gardens, yards, farms, and lives.
The Historical, Indigenous, and Natural Roots of Biochar
Nature makes biochar herself. According to Kelpie Wilson, much of the fertility in the grasslands and savannahs throughout the world is the result of eons of biochar-making in the form of wildfires. These naturally-occurring fertility enhancing fires were harnessed by indigenous cultures around the world, who have made Biochar for increased soil fertility throughout millennia, including the Terra Preta of Amazonian cultures. Biochar has been found around dwellings in Africa, Spain, Medieval Europe, Amazonia, and elsewhere. And, it was used as a nutritive food supplement by ancient Greeks and Egyptians (See esp. Hippocrates, Pliny, and Galen). Now, you can make and incorporate biochar into your own gardens, yards, and soil-building practices with the practical “how-to” guidance provided by Kelpie in her book and her special Biochar Module in the Y on Earth Community’s Simple Gardening Wisdom Video Course. She also provides special, easy-to-use “Ring of Fire” biochar kilns, available for sale through her Ring of Fire offerings.
Uplevel Your Biochar (and Gardening) Expertise Today
Use the code YOE35 to get an exclusive 35% discount on Kelpie’s book at Chelsea Green Publishing.
And, participate in the Simple Gardening Wisdom Video Course (with special bundle pricing, for a limited time) to access a bespoke module on “Backyard Biochar Mastery” created by Kelpie Wilson in partnership with the Y on Earth Community.
About Kelpie Wilson
Kelpie Wilson is a writer, mechanical engineer, and author of The Biochar Handbook: A Practical Guide to Making and Using Bioactivated Charcoal. She has worked in the biochar field since 2008 as an independent consultant and also as a project developer and writer for the International Biochar Initiative. From 2004-2008 she was the environmental editor and columnist at Truthout.org and a contributing editor for Yoga Plus magazine. She has published more than 100 articles in numerous magazines and online publications on climate change, environment and energy. From 2004-2006 she was a technical writer for Energy Outfitters, a solar equipment distributor. Prior to
that she spent 12 years as a forest protection advocate with the Siskiyou Regional Education Project in Oregon. Before moving to Oregon, she worked for a small R&D firm designing Stirling cycle engines in Berkeley, California.
Resources & Related Episodes
Order your Ring of Fire Biochar Kiln: RingofFire.earth
Wilson Biochar Associates: https://wilsonbiochar.com/
Get The Biochar Handbook at Chelsea Green Publishing (use code YOE35 for exclusive 35% discount)
Ep. 124 – Nick DiDomenico, Co-Founder, Drylands Agroecology Research
Ep. 122 – Dr. David Laird, PhD, Biochar Science & Climate Stability
Ep. 120 – Rowdy Yeatts, Founder & CEO, High Plains Biochar
Ep. 101 – William “Sandy” Karstens, Sacred Geometry & Subatomic Physics
Ep. 25 – Hunter Lovins, A Finer Future
Ep. 94 – Tom Chi, At One Ventures (investing in regenerative technologies)
Transcript
Welcome to the YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry, and today
we’re visiting with the author of the Biochar Handbook, Kelpie Wilson. Kelpie, it’s so great
to be with you today. How are you? I’m fine. Thanks. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I’m really excited to have you on our podcast and to talk about Biochar in part because,
you know, we’ve had a few other episodes around Biochar and I’ve already learned so much from
you, including when we were recently recording the module for our Simple Gardening Wisdom video
course and I’ve actually learned several things from you that I’m really, really excited to talk
about. So thanks for being here today. Yeah, you bet. Kelpie Wilson is the author of the Biochar
Handbook, a practical guide to making and using bioactivated charcoal. She’s not only a writer
but also a mechanical engineer and has worked in the Biochar field since 2008 as an independent
consultant and also as a project developer and writer for the International Biochar Initiative.
From 2004 to 2008, she was the environmental editor and columnist at truthout.org and a
contributing editor for Yoga Plus Magazine. She has published more than 100 articles in
numerous magazines and online publications on climate change, environment and energy.
From 2004 to 2006, Kelpie was a technical writer for Energy Outfitters, a solar equipment
distributor. Prior to that, she spent 12 years as a forest protection advocate with the Sisiq
Regional Education Project in Oregon and before moving to Oregon, she worked for a small research
and development firm designing sterling cycle engines in Berkeley, California and Kelpie,
I got to just hold the book up here for our video audience. This is a Chelsea Green publication,
an absolutely beautiful book that is also a tremendous resource and we definitely encourage
folks to get the book and if a little later in the episode we’ll talk about a way you can get a
discount on that. And yeah, let’s Kelpie maybe start at the beginning here for those of our
audience who might not yet be as familiar with biochar and what we’re talking about here today.
Can you give us the quick overview to get oriented here? What is biochar?
Yeah, there is a bit of confusion about it because it’s hard to find an official definition,
although there is one. The International Biochar Initiative has one. It’s part of the
characterization standards that I actually worked on when I was with them and it basically says,
well biochar is just charcoal. So it’s the definition of charcoal that’s made from clean
biomass. We add that on, it’s to be made from clean biomass and it has to be friendly to soil.
It has to be able to be used in soil or for other purposes like carbon sequestration,
but most people are thinking of it in terms of using it in soil or biological system. So it has to
be clean basically. But beyond that, there’s a huge range of materials that are charcoal or biochar
that can be really different and it depends on mainly two things. The feedstock it’s made from,
you know, is it made from bamboo or grass or manure or wood and the temperature at which it’s
made. So the processing conditions and that, so you can have, it’s basically a matter of cooking,
how much you cook it. So you can lightly cook something like roasted coffee that’s called
torrefaction or you can cook it a little harder and if you cook it really hot, you make something
that’s more like activated carbon. So very light porous material that’s almost pure carbon. Whereas
on the other end of the spectrum, you know, coffee, roasted coffee or torrefied wood is kind of brown
and it’s a little bit of char in it, but it’s, you know, it’s not that much. And then sort of in the
middle is what we would think of as fuel charcoal and that’s usually made at, you know, a medium kind
of temperature and in a way so that the oils and gases that are in the wood will, some of it will
recondense in the char and that’s great for fuel, you know, because that’s more BTUs basically,
but it’s not that great for soil. So that’s the basic definition of biochar. Got it, that’s great.
Yeah, and of course BTUs being British thermal units a way of measuring heat capacity or potential
caloric potential in fuels when we combust them, right? Right, yeah. Hey, I understand also that
there’s something going on in this, you describe the triangle of fuel, oxygen and trying to find
my notes here, what’s the third thing I’m forgetting? Heat. Heat, there it is, fuel, oxygen and when
making biochar, whether it’s in very advanced commercial technological facilities and equipment
or in the backyard in a barrel or something, we’re sort of controlling for the available
oxygen. Is that right? Is that the right way to understand that? Yeah, that’s key. And so
there are many different ways to make charcoal, the way that most people kind of think about it,
you know, have any experience with charcoal making is the traditional way of making fuel charcoal.
And that’s very, very low tech, primitive methods of you stack up a bunch of wood in a pit, maybe
cover it with dirt, you light one end and it smolders for days. So it’s that slow cooking
and it just pumps out smoke. And so the dirt mound is keeping oxygen out of the process,
so it doesn’t burn all the way to ash because the first thing to understand, so you’ve got
the fuel triangle, that’s great. Those are the three things you need for a fire. So that’s oxygen,
fuel and heat. If you cut off the oxygen, you’re not going to complete the reaction. So the second
thing you need to know is that when you burn something biomass, it’s burns and stages and the
first stages you add the heat and the gases start coming out. And those gases turn into smoke. If
there’s no flame there to ignite the gases, the gases are going to cool and turn into smoke. So
that’s what happens in your traditional charcoal mounds. And then the second stage is once the
gases are all gone from your wood, now the remaining carbon, it’s almost pure carbon,
is go to fuse and make these fused carbon rings where all the carbon links up and that makes the
very hard to degrade carbon structure and that’s in charcoal and biochar. And at that stage,
you know, with the mound, with the pit mound, it kind of goes out because it’s, it doesn’t have
enough air to complete the reaction. So you’re left with a charcoal. And then there’s another way
of making biochar that’s done in a lot of the more high tech industrial processes,
which is called a retort. And that is think of that more as like a pressure cooker, although
there usually isn’t pressure, but it’s just a closed vessel with a little outlet to let the steam
out. And so you heat that externally, which means you have to transfer the heat through a metal wall
and into the material. So, and that’s a very, very positive way of making charcoal. You don’t
have any oxygen in there at all. And so once you heat it up and the gases leave, there’s no oxygen
can get in there and you save your charcoal. And usually that’s in a batch process that’s done by
just letting it cool. And once the heat is gone, the combustion can’t continue. So first the oxygen
is gone. And then after the heat is gone, you wait till the heat is gone, and then you open it up and
it can’t burn anymore. Now the way we, I make biochar and the way some other processes called
gasification make biochar is we allow some air in there, but we control the air, especially at the
end. So I’m making biochar in campfires, essentially. And anybody who’s ever been to a campground and
seen a campfire ring, where you know, the people who were there before had a big party, they just
kept piling on the wood, right? And then they all passed out and went to bed. And you see this
fire is full of ash. But if you dig down in there, you’ll find pieces of charcoal down at the bottom,
where the air never got down in there. And after the flame went out and the whole thing started
cooling, the charcoal on the bottom was saved. So that’s what we do, but a little more efficiently.
And so we let it burn, we light the fire, we let it go through the first stage of burning,
where the gas comes out and that makes a flame, which provides the heat to keep
the reaction going. But down at the bottom of the pile or the bottom of the kiln,
the char is saved and we put it out with water then. So with water, we’re removing the heat
and the oxygen at the same time. And so that’s how we utilize the fire triangle.
Oh, that’s great. Thanks for explaining that. I think I may have actually been at one or two of
those campfire parties over the years. Oh, I don’t believe that.
You know, these days, especially as it relates to soil regeneration, carbon sequestration,
climate stabilization, biochar has really arrived on the scene as one of the big strategies we have
at a global scale. Of course, these are very localized applications, but in the aggregate
at a global scale. And some of our biochar production, as you’re describing, is using very
sophisticated technological machinery and control systems and so forth. However, humans,
we’ve been making biochar in one form or another since time immemorial. This has been part of many
indigenous cultures, as I understand it, and landscape stewardship practices. And
Mother Nature herself makes biochar without human intervention also. Is that, am I
understanding that correctly? Can you explain that to us a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. Well,
I think the most interesting fact that I have about that is, look at the most productive soils in the
world agriculturally. And those are the chernazems. So those are the prairie or step regions, such as
you find in Iowa, in our country, or in Ukraine. Those are the most productive soils in the world
for agriculture. And half of the carbon in those soils, up to half the carbon, can be biochar or
charcoal. And that’s because, you know, a prairie or a step with those grasses, there’s a regular fire
that ignites the grasses and burns them off. But down, you know, like think of prairie grasses,
they’re like 10 feet tall, right? And so the fire just, flames just go roaring through, and they heat
the down at the bottom where the step, the stems are really thick. There’s not a lot of air. And so
those char, and after the flame leaves, it all cools and you get char. And you do that every 10
years. And of course, indigenous people, the Native Americans for sure, assisted that process by
lighting fires regularly as well. And so you end up accumulating a lot of char in soil. So to me,
that’s about the only testimony I really need that, you know, charcoal is good for soils. And
that’s a great example of how nature does it. Same in our fire adapted for us here in the west.
You know, up to 50% of the carbon in those soils can be charcoal. And what’s interesting,
and this gets into a whole other issue, but fire exclusion over past 100 years, aggressively fighting
fires has left us in terrible shape in our forests, just from, you know, the thickets of young trees
coming up and creating a huge fire danger. But also what a lot of people don’t realize is we’re
missing the charcoal component in the soil. Because same thing, you know, in some of these forests,
like where I am, there’s a fire return interval of 10 to 20 years. And so what’s the impact of that
on nutrient cycling, on moisture retention, of excluding that charcoal from the soils? So
what was the rest of the question? Yeah, no, this is great. I was asking about the sort of long
history of biochar on the planet, both with mother nature herself and then also with indigenous
cultures working with the fire. That’s mother nature. And then you can start to see how the
indigenous people, you know, start working with nature to do more regular fires, you know, for
various reasons, because fire is nutrient cycling. So when you burn off an understory to forest,
you get the little green shoots of things that are food plants or used for basketry material
here in the northwest. And, you know, so you get nice food plants and nutrient cycling.
So that’s probably been done, you know, ever since humans started burning things with fire.
But then you have the more deliberate ones, like the terra preta soils, which is amazing.
Look at what these people accomplished. It took thousands of years, but basically there’s an area
of the size of France, they say, in the Brazilian Amazon that is terra preta soils. And it’s not
just to be clear, it’s not just one contiguous piece of land. It’s all along the high river
bluffs along the Amazon. That’s where those terra preta soils are because that’s where people live.
They lived along the rivers. So that’s one example. And then there are many other examples,
Africa, Spain, in Europe, you look at the walled cities, the medieval cities and the middens
around those cities. People, this just kind of naturally happened. And then maybe I think at a
certain point, people, you know, realized the benefits and maybe promoted it. But you’re in a
city with a bunch of other people, and you’ve got waste, you’ve got food waste, you’ve got human waste,
you’ve got cooking fires. And those cooking fires sometimes have bits of charcoal, they have ash,
and they’re used to deodorize the waste. And that waste is carried out to the edge of the town,
edge of the city, where the fields aren’t stumped in the fields, it’s fertilizer.
So there’s a pretty high charcoal content even around medieval cities in Europe,
and, you know, all kinds of settlements all over the world.
So they’re both crop burning, you know, deliberate crop burning for the same reason
native people would burn the prairies, you know, agriculturalists would burn crop residue
to get that ash, because the ash has all the minerals that the plants use. So it gets that
right back into the soil, and there’s always going to be bits of char in there too.
So interesting. Yeah, and, you know, as we’re recording here, it’s middle of May 2024, already
we’re seeing some pretty intense forest fires have broken out in Canada.
And this centuries long fire exclusion or suppression strategy has created a scenario
in which we see lower frequency, but much higher intensity fires that can be absolutely devastating,
not only for homes and ecosystems, but also right down to the soil biology itself, right,
because we get higher temperatures and it’s disrupting, it’s in some cases sterilizing the
soil, whereas the higher frequency lower intensity fires contribute to this virtuous cycle of
fertility and carbon sequestration. I’m just wondering from your perspective, given
all of your background and expertise in forest management, is it your view that we ought to
essentially figure out a way to get a whole bunch of folks mobilized in the world’s forests,
and fitting and managing and creating biochar is a way to address these multiple risks and
challenges that we’re facing? Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. And there’s different ways of
doing that. A lot of its handwork, though, which involves people. So I was like that Wendell Berry
quote, what are people for? I think we’re here to go out and make a difference and clean up our
mistakes for one thing. I’ve been promoting that a lot, both through the kilns that I sell,
all the ring of fire kiln, which is a good tool, but also more and more just through different
ways of doing pile burning. And so we can do pile burning out on the landscape because these
are vast areas. There’s a huge amount of material. And so right now we’re doing a lot of pile burning,
but we’re doing it in a way where there’s this sort of hot shot mentality that firefighters have of
complete consumption. When they do a backburn, they’re like, we’re going to save the town. We’re
just like make a scorched landscape. And the same thing with with pile burning. It’s like,
we’re going to get rid of these fuels. And so first of all, we’re burning bigger stuff than we need
to because big logs are not a fire danger than they’re an ecosystem asset. But so the small
stuff is what we need to burn. And if we’re just burning it to ash, we destroy the soil. We get a
burn pile scar. And some places those scars don’t grow back for decades even. And they become a
site where invasive species can move in. So what I’m really promoting most right now is to just
put those piles out with water at the end. We can make a lot of biochar in a burn pile. And then
like we’re having really good luck now seeding those charcoal piles with native seed mixes
and getting great germination. So we’re doing something really good for forest soils.
We don’t make as much smoke because part of this process is to keep the flame on top and that burns
the smoke. And then once we’ve done that and removed, you know, done the vegetation management
and thinned out the forest, then we need to break back prescribed fire. And we need to learn from
the indigenous traditional ecological knowledge. You know, they have a lot to teach us. We need
to actually put them in charge of this because they know how to do it. And bring back the prescribed
burning. And that’s a big thing happening here right now, where I am in California, Oregon,
there’s a lot of interest in it. So that’s the way forward for restoring our forests.
I love it. It’s going to take people. It’s going to take a lot of people. This is hand work. I mean,
there’s some ways that machinery can help. Like when we have big piles of biomass piled up, we can
use some bigger machine called an air curtain burner. And you can load that with machinery. And
that’s all good. But, you know, everybody in the biochar industry is always talking about
scaling up. Like you’re saying, there’s so much to do. There’s such a great potential.
We’ve got to scale this up. Well, there’s different ways of scaling up. And so with the hand work
and these large landscapes, I like to call it scaling out. We need to scale out across the
landscape. And we need to put people to work. And it’s a great job for people who are maybe
haven’t really been workforce participants in a good way or who have maybe experienced some trauma.
We have a group, a contracting group of veterans who are doing this work now.
And it’s really, it’s really nice to spend your day out in the woods burning stuff. It’s very
satisfying. You know, for people who could not ever go and work in an office, you know, or do
anything like that. This is work they can do and they can feel really good about themselves.
It’s wonderful. Yeah, I’m get really good exercise and body movement and all the benefits of the
pheromones that the trees and plants are putting off. I mean, there’s so much science emerging.
Oh, bacteria and all that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, all of that. That’s so, so beautiful. Well, and
I want to show our audience again, your beautiful book, the biochar handbook here,
which is a Chelsea Green publication. And if you go to ChelseaGreen.com, you can get a copy.
You can even use the code Y-O-E-3-5 for a 35% discount for our audience if you’d like. And
of course, Chelsea Green is one of our strategic partners. And in this book, Kelpie, you’ve got
so much information and it’s such a great resource. And it’s also wonderfully written. And
you’ve sprinkled some history in there in a way I really appreciate as a history lover myself.
And I wanted to ask kind of running down one of the rabbit holes about this little section
toward the front of the book, where you’re talking about a person named Justus Liebig.
And you’re talking about the Black Madonna, the Black Virgin. Can you tell us a bit about this
and kind of connect the dots for us? How in the heck that might relate to charcoal in the soil?
Sure. Yeah, that was so fun doing that research because,
you know, it’s so early on, I think, I forget who turned me on to this, but Google
Books has all these old agricultural journals from the 19th century
that are online have been digitized and all kinds of ink journals. And there’s so much
great science from that period of time that is worth revisiting. But so all these agricultural
journals and there were many of them in English and in England and the US. And I started reading,
looking up charcoal. What do they say about charcoal? And there’s a ton of material.
But one of the first things I found was that Justus Liebig, who a lot of people know as the
father of NPK or Liebig’s Barrel, have you ever seen that little diagram of Liebig’s Barrel?
Basically, he was the first agricultural chemist. He had a laboratory in Germany in the 1830s, I
think, is when he started that. And he was just looking at what do plants actually eat? And so he
would take plants and combust them and figure out what the different elements were. And it’s like,
well, there’s nitrogen and there’s phosphorus and there’s potassium. So that’s what plants eat.
And Liebig’s Barrel is just saying, well, you don’t need more potassium than the plant uses.
So when you’re fertilizing a soil, the plant only needs so much potassium,
so if you put in extra, it’s going to flow out of the barrel anyway. But one of the things that
was controversial at that time was, well, do plants eat carbon from the soil? And so there was a group
of people, the scientists that called themselves vitalists who said, the soil has a vital
property. And the black soil is more vital than a more dirt soil, more mineral soil. So it’s that
vitality. And actually, that black soil has more carbon. So it must be that it’s that black carbon
in the soil that the plants, that’s where they get their carbon from. And so there was a connection,
I think, to the black mandalinas, which are a very interesting thing throughout Europe
in the early Middle Ages, a lot of the churches had these madanas that had dark skin. And people
wondered about that because this was Europe. And most of the depictions of the Madonna and child
would show a lighter skin. So the idea was that this was worshiping kind of the ancient goddess
of the soil, because there was all this syncretic adoption and merging of Christianity with the
ancient pagan traditions. So the black Madonna was the soil goddess, or that aspect of the Madonna
that related to fertility. So that all makes a lot of sense. But Liebig said, no, plants don’t get
their carbon from soil. And the violists were like, well, prove it, you know, because the black
soils are the most productive infertals. So of course they do. While Liebig proved it was
really interesting, he got charcoal, which was well known to not degrade that microbes couldn’t,
well, they don’t know if they knew about microbes then, but it didn’t degrade, right? And so plants
couldn’t take it up, take up carbon from it. And he would just, he would grow plants in pure
charcoal with some other nitrogen fertilizer. And they grew just fine. So he said they’re taking
their carbon from the atmosphere, from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s where
they’re getting the carbon from. And that’s how he proved it with charcoal. And then that got a
lot of people interested. So a lot of people around the world, people who are growing, you know,
exotic plants in greenhouses, started trying to see, well, what happens if we add charcoal to soil?
And they found, wow, it makes the plants grow better, they’re healthier, they don’t have as much
disease. The flowers have more vibrant colors, that’s interesting. And so, and then a lot of other
people started experimenting with it. And Libic, meanwhile, was mostly still working on the chemical
fertilizer angle and saying, oh, you know, we don’t need manure, we can, we can go harvest guano
from the Pacific, you know, from the South Pacific, and we can mine phosphorus and potassium, and we
can get, you know, we can fertilize our crops and increase our production massively. And so he went
through that phase. But at a certain point, he started having misgivings. So this is all in the
book, this story. And he’s like, well, wait a minute, what if we, what if there was a war with,
with America, and we couldn’t get our guano? I don’t know what made him think it could be a war
with America. But anyway, this isn’t about 1850 or something. And we can’t get our guano. Maybe we
should rethink this dependence on chemical fertilizer. So this is Libic, the guy who came up with the
whole idea. And then what another thing that was going on at the same time was sewage. So all the
great cities of Europe, London, and Paris, especially, were rethinking the way they handled that,
that human or, you know, the night soil. So it was saying before about the medieval cities,
people brought it out in buckets, mixed with charcoal and ash, and built soil around the
cities and the fields. But in London, the wealthy people were getting a little tired of that.
And they had always had storm sewers. So just open channels to channel stormwater into the,
the river of the Thames. Well, the wealthy people figured out, well, we’ve got, we’ve got on the,
on the second or third floor, we can make a little toilet and flush our waste into the sewer.
It’ll go right to the river out of our way. And what the result of that was an intense cholera
epidemic. And sometime in the 1850s, they just, you know, killed thousands of people because
they were washing all this waste. And so, you know, there now were different ideas about how to do
this, because, you know, it can’t just kill off the population so that rich people can have flush
toilets. And they debated it for 20 or 30 years before they finally put in a, you know, more of a
sewage treatment plant. But during that debate, Libigh weighed in and said, wait a minute,
that’s a waste of nutrients. And I’m realizing now we need that night soil for the fields,
you know, because we, you know, we can’t just use chemical fertilizer. You know, that’s,
that’s not good. We need to be more, we have more of a circular economy. And so he made a
recommendation for how to treat the night soil. He said, you know, use, use sulfur and use charcoal.
And, and see, we did a few other things. We said, use, use charcoal. And he was right, because when
you add charcoal or biochar to manure, you, you preserve the nutrients, you preserve the nitrogen,
nitrogen especially. So he, and so he wrote letters to the city of London, to the parliament,
and made his recommendation. And, and the response of after all that lobbying was, oh, that’s too
expensive. We like the flush toilet. We’ll go with that. It’s just a great lesson in how we just
have made some very wrong steps in the past. Amazing. Well, yeah, that’s really quite a beautiful
story and has, I think, kernels of wisdom in it, obviously. I’m, I’m struck that this
debate back then with the vitalists around the, the vitality in the soil makes me think of one
of the things I was so happy to learn from you recently regarding the free electrons in the
micro structure of the biochar. And I want to ask what might be my most kind of nerdy question
for the day. Can you tell us a bit about the amazingly beautiful, in my opinion,
hexagonal micro structures in the biochar? This is now looking at the, at a very small scale.
And the, what you describe as the eight allotropes in your book, which by the way has some really
a beautiful, beautiful illustration of some of these geometries. And can you explain to us what’s
going on with the electrons there that provides such a potentially vitalizing source of nourishment
for plants and perhaps others? Yeah. So, I mean, everybody’s learning a lot about soil and life
and how it works. And I’m no expert or I’m not a chemist. But what I learned about it was, well,
first of all, carbon is a very interesting element. I mean, we’re a carbon-based life form.
We wouldn’t be here without carbon. And so it, and it takes a lot of different forms. It’s a real
shape shifter. But that, so, you know, it could be a diamond. That’s one of the allotropes,
which is one of the forms it can take. So a diamond has more of a kite shaped,
A diamond has more of a kite-shaped, you know, four angles to it structure.
And that’s of course a pretty unique structure. It can be a gas, you know, carbon dioxide.
And so those are both called mineral carbon. And then it can be this hexagonal shape. And,
you know, that can be in a mineral form as well, like graphite, or something like a carbon nanotube,
or a buckyball, which are like sheets of these hexagonal rings that link together into a tube,
or a sheet, or a ball shape that are very interesting nanomaterials, partly because of
their electrical properties. So that’s a whole other field of sciences carbon nanomaterials
and their electrical properties. But charcoal in soil and also just carbon in our bodies,
in carbon chemistry, think of all the organic chemistry is based on that carbon ring.
So that’s what it means, organic chemistry. And think of all the different compounds
that include those carbon rings. So just about everything our bodies are made of
has a carbon ring in it. And I can’t really speak to what all the chemical implications of that are.
But in soil, what we see with biotar specifically is that, you know, it’s basically little sheets
of carbon rings that are kind of jumbled up, like think of a bag of potato chips at a nanoscale.
And each chip is a little sheet of these carbon rings that are not easy for microbes to eat.
They’re very, very strong structurally. And when they link up, so carbon, a carbon atom
is missing two electrons in the outer shell. And it links up with another carbon atom.
And it links up with, you know, five others to make a six element, a six atom molecule
in that hexagonal ring. The electrons are all in that ring, and they can move around that ring.
And so that makes them available to help with reactions, chemical reactions. And it works so
that with microbes in biochar, when they do metabolism, and you know, when they’re eating
food and processing it with the chemical reactions of metabolism, sometimes there’s an
electron that has to be gotten rid of to complete the reaction. And sometimes they need an electron.
And so the biochar surface with those mobile electrons can provide an electron or it can
accept an electron. And so it makes a really powerful substrate for microbial metabolism.
Amazing. I’m picturing the electrons as being these agents, free to move around in the biology
there, similar to perhaps the medieval stone masons who were free to move around to build
beautiful cathedrals and so on. Crazy analogy, perhaps, but it’s so interesting to think about
this. And then to also think a little bit about the ionic charging going on. And my understanding
is even like in the health and wellness of our own bodies, it’s often the positively charged
ionic particles that we call free radicals that need additional electrons to get neutralized
that otherwise wreak havoc on our bodies. You know, that’s a very kind of oversimplification.
Yeah, I’m just learning about all this stuff too. I really am, you know, no expert. But
this, I don’t know if you’ve run into this electroculture idea. This guy, Yannick Van Dorn.
Not yet. That’s amazing. Interesting. You know, like after the clunder storm, when there’s
lightning strikes, plants grow better. Because now there’s all of a sudden some extra electrons in
the soil. So there’s these people are putting copper antennas into the earth. And, you know,
I don’t know if that works or not. But I do know that lightning strikes put electrons in soil,
and that seems to help growth. So it’s kind of an interesting idea.
So cool. So interesting. Wow. A lot to learn.
No doubt about it. No doubt about it. Well, and, you know, sort of harkening back here to the
Wendell Berry quote you mentioned earlier, you know, what are people for? I know that in many
indigenous cosmologies and stories, you know, there’s great and profound ecological knowledge
woven into the cultural fabric, so that often stories will tell, oh, coyote has this purpose,
and bear has this purpose, and eagle has this purpose, and salmon has this purpose. And then
you get to the humans, and what is the purpose? The purpose is the stewardship of the landscape,
that we are sort of these free moving in a way agents as well, who at least in the traditional
life ways plays a very significant role in taking care of these landscapes that we inhabit and
experience. And what I’m hearing sort of the subtext of the work you’re doing, Kelpie, and the
amazing knowledge you’re sharing with us is an invitation for us individually and in communities
to get out and get more time in our natural landscapes, doing this ecological stewardship
work centrally organized around the power of the living carbon, the biochar, the soil building,
the fundamental activity that it seems makes our planet much more stable, livable, healthy,
and I love it because the invitation to me is so exciting. It’s really my hope,
something millions of us will get to experience in the very near future.
Oh, no doubt. I mean, it’s going back to the way people used to live. So, you know,
with our feet on the ground, and the lack of grounding is what’s making us so sick. So,
we need it for our own healing. It’s not just about healing the earth. We need the earth more
than the earth needs us. Oh, I’m going to quote you on that one. That’s a good one.
You know, speaking of going back to the way we used to do things, I noticed looking through your
bio, preparing for our discussion today, that you did some of your education at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And one of my very favorite authors, William Irwin Thompson,
was there in the 70s when he wrote this fabulous essay called The Meta Industrial Village. And
in it, he envisions a future with technology like we’re using right now that enables global
communication, global information sharing, collaboration across a planetary scale, while we
also move back in the direction of localized and regionalized relationships with our living
environments, including the stewardship practices that you’re talking about with soil building,
growing healthy nutrient dense food, and fiber that makes sense in the ecological context,
and so on. And so, yeah, just a shout out to William Irwin Thompson. Rest his soul. And MIT,
I’m curious with your engineering background, obviously, you’re bringing a very kind of hard
scientific view and lens into this work as well. And of course, with the technology that you offer
through Ring of Fire.Earth, you’ve got some tools that people can get themselves for their own
yards, farms, ranches, neighborhoods, communities, you know, even imagining,
perhaps churches or schools, getting some of the tools you offer for a community scale
implementation. Can you walk us through your Ring of Fire biochar kiln and let us know
some of the best ways people can get those and get those deployed?
Yeah, absolutely. I sell them to a lot of community groups. Because it’s a community effort when
you’re talking about fire protection, especially. So, you know, we have something called Firewise
Communities here, because you can clear around your own home, but if your neighbors haven’t done it,
you know, you’re not going to be very protected from fire. So, it is really a community effort,
and fire has always brought people together. So, I sell the accounts to a lot of community
conservation districts that lend them out to their members, to small farmers, to
vineyard owners, and people have orchards. So, you can go to my website, ringoffire.earth,
and you can place a pre-order there. The thing about this kiln is it’s six panels,
main panels, no piece of it weighs more than 40 pounds. So, you just, you bolt the panels together,
and then there’s a heat shield that goes around it. So, that’s really the cool part of it, is the
heat shield. The kiln is seven and a half feet in diameter and 40 inches tall, and the heat shield
controls the air flows a little bit better, and it protects you from the heat, because
seven and a half feet in diameter, that’s pretty big fire, and that’s a lot of heat that can get
put out. So, basically, you just throw material in there, light it on top, let it burn down,
and you keep adding material. So, you can consume a lot of material, and at the end of your four
or five hours of burn time, you end up with three cubic yards of biochar, which is quite a lot of
biochar. You can do a lot with that, and then you can move it somewhere else the next day and do it
again. I have contractors who are buying them and using them on jobs where they do clearing around
people’s houses or working for agencies, doing vegetation management. We’ve got people who are
using them to process invasive species, not endangered species, like Scotchbrew. You know,
anything that’s kind of woody and branchy will work. Woodchips or straw, things like that, won’t,
because they pack down, because the way it works is all the air comes from the top,
and then, you know, goes down in the kiln and back up. So, you’ve got these circulating air.
That tends to burn the smoke, and it also tends to prevent any embers from coming out. So, it’s a
really much safer way to burn than in just an open pile. And what I also like to encourage people,
if you’ve just got a backyard, you know, or even a balcony with a barbecue kettle, a kettle grill,
you can make biochar in that, and you can use it in your house plants. It’s a great way to get
started and just get started to connect. So, I’ve had a lot of fun designing kilns over the years
and stoves and other little devices that I can take around with here. You know, I don’t have a
lab. I’m not connected with the university, so I have to do things and learn things on my own.
And the benefit of that, though, is that if I can figure out how to do it in my little space,
anybody can do it. So, science for the people. I love it. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of
Gandhi’s notion of Swadeshi doing things with our hands at that cottage scale.
It’s so empowering. And I’m writing down science for the people here. Another pithy
kelp-yism, I’m going to call it. And by the way, you, in putting together the
educational module for our Simple Gardening Wisdom video course, you put together a beautiful
presentation of many photos that give us great visual experience of these different scales
and applications. And I want to really encourage folks to check out the Simple Gardening Wisdom
video course. You can go to the Y on Earth.org website and go to the community market or
store page. And you’ll see a link there to the video course right now. We’re running a very special
launch bundle price, basically reducing the whole course by well over half. And it’s priced
under $100, well under $100, closer to $80, with kelp-y and many other wonderful experts who have
provided modules to help you improve your gardening results and or get started. If you’re not yet
gardening it, it’s a really great way to get oriented and get some of the basics and some of
the advanced tips and tricks that are easy to incorporate into your garden. So we want to
encourage you to check that out. And of course, just want to reiterate, you can get the book,
the biochar handbook kelpys book at chelseagreen.com if you’d like. Use the code Y-O-E-3-5 for a
35% discount. And the Ring of Fire biochar kiln kelpys was just talking about is available at
ringofire.earth. Of course, the all these links will be available in the show notes. And then
kelpys also has a website wilsonbiochar.com. This is wilsonbiocharassociates. And I want to be sure
to give a shout out not only to Chelsea Green Publishing, but a few of our other partners who
make our YonEarth community podcast series possible along with the rest of our regeneration
renaissance and pathways to planetary prosperity work possible, including with our growing global
network of ambassadors. And these partners include Patagonia, Earth Coast Productions,
profitable purpose consulting, Wele Waters, hemp infused aromatherapy, soaking salts, Josephine
Porter Institute for Biodynamics, edafic solutions, and a huge thank you to our ambassadors and others
who have joined our monthly giving program. You can go to Patreon, look up YonEarth community,
or go to our site, YonEarth.org to join the monthly giving program at any level that works
best for you. And if you give at the $33 a month level or higher, as a thank you, we’ll send you
a jar of the Wele Waters soaking salts each month for your own personal health and self care practice.
And up from 33, you can go to 77 or 133 and get three jars or five jars a month, which also means
you’ve got a nice little stash on hand for that gift for the friend, the birthday
present that you need at a moment’s notice, whatever it might be, it’s a wonderful gift giving
opportunity as well. And just want to give a huge shout out to our ambassadors. And if
you’re interested in joining our growing global ambassador network, just go to YonEarth.org,
find the page, become an ambassador, start your journey there. One of the really amazing
opportunities for our ambassadors, in addition to having exclusive access to video recordings
from a variety of symposia and workshops and conferences, and our monthly online meetup with
folks from all around the world, Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Germany, all over the place. You have
access to all those recordings, and you also have access to our behind the scenes segment with our
podcast guests. And that’s an exclusive benefit for our ambassador network. So we look forward
to seeing you if that’s something you’d like to join. And a huge invitation, just want to remind
folks, get this book. This book by Kelpie is a great resource and will help you improve your own
health and wellness, your neighborhood, your livability, quality of life, while also sequestering
carbon and doing your part to improve our ecology, our climate, and these major systems that we all
rely upon and depend upon. And Kelpie, I guess I have to ask you, sort of a, I guess it’s kind of
a joke, but your biochart kiln has six sides. These carbon rings have six sides. Is six your
favorite number? Well, it’s a good number. I like the poetry and the aesthetics of the hexagon,
for sure. It has some cool meaning and sacred geometry, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it’s really
interesting that you can take a circle and take the diameter of that circle and with a compass and
mark it around exactly six times, or the radius, rather. So those are interesting relationships.
I think more from a practical standpoint, the first version of the kiln was three panels
that were six or five. And, you know, so a lot of it has to do with what size does a steel sheet
come in, as you can have to use it for manufacturing. And I was shipping those around. It was, you had
to build a long, extra long pallet to ship a six-foot panel. So at a certain point, like,
I’m tired of this. Can we do four-foot panels? And of course, you know, four six-foot panels
worked out to be a nice size. It was a little bigger than the old kiln, which I was ready
for a little bit bigger kiln. So it’s a combination of things.
That’s so great. Yeah. And obviously, there’s a tremendous efficiency with six-sided structures,
not only at the molecular scale, but of course, we see with honeybees. And the work,
Buck and Sir Fuller was doing, you alluded earlier to the buckyball. And yeah, what a beautiful
geometry. And maybe I’ll give a shout out to our good friend, William Sandy Carstens. We had on
the podcast, we did an episode called The Sacred Geometry of Subatomic Physics. He’s a physics
professor in Vermont. And that was a really fun episode that we did with him. And I wanted to
ask you, Kelpie, about this app, the Char app that you speak about in the book. And some of the
folks you’re collaborating with through this group, you told me, is called Biochar in the
Woods. And your colleague, Mr. Becker from South Africa, can you give us a bit of a view
into what’s going on with the app and the group for collaboration?
Sure. Yeah. So, on the one hand, we have this great need to get carbon in soils and to deal with
our fuels problem here. And that’s separate from anything climate related. We need to return
the charcoal. We need to deal with the fuels. And so that’s on the one hand. And that’s a lot
urgency to that. And a lot of need. And so we want to deploy crews to do that. But we need,
in order to get funding to do that, we need to show how much it’s going to cost. How much can we
produce? How long does it take? How many people does it take? What’s the cost? And so really,
in our Biochar in the Woods group, which anybody can join if you’re interested in doing this kind
of thing, it’s Biochar in the Woods at groups.io. I’ll give you that link. Thank you. We get together
once a month by Zoom and we just talk about what we’re doing. So we’ve got contractors there. We’ve
got people from the Forest Service show sometimes. And people are just working in their own little
back 40. And we talk about what we’re doing. And so two years ago, I was just saying we need
to quantify what we’re doing. How do we just make sure we can measure the amount of char we make and
get these numbers down so we can start doing job costing, basically. And so this young South African
man raises his hand and said, I’ve got an ax for that. And that was Vian Becker. And so he’s a
civil engineer and he’s got a company called AD Tech. And he’s been working on sustainability
and circular economy and carbon accounting. And so he had started working with Biochar
in South Africa. And they were working on this, what’s called DMRV, digital monitoring, verification
and reporting. So this is what you need if you want to get carbon money. And Biochar is now really
rising to prominence in the carbon finance world because I think the Paris Agreement,
one of the last IPCCC agreements, basically said there’s no way we need emissions targets,
emissions reduction targets in time to prevent, you know, greater than two degrees or greater than
one and a half degrees warming, I forget which it is. So we have to do carbon removal. We’ve got
to do something to pull carbon out of the air. And of course, all the industrialists and Chevron
and all those people immediately said, well, we’re going to create big plants that suck carbon dioxide
out of the air and pump it underground. Like, yeah, right. Meanwhile, you know, other people are
saying, let’s grow more trees, let’s grow more grasslands, let’s look at these natural climate
solutions. And so, you know, that’s very productive and good. But there’s been an increasing kind of
reluctance to fund just reforestation or afforestation programs planting trees because
trees, there’s no guarantee, right? There’s a lot of risk there that the tree is going to live
or that it’s not going to get cut down or burned. So, you know, that makes it less sure.
And as biochar becomes more known, you know, there are now thousands and thousands of research
papers on biochar, all of its properties and what happens to it in soil. And it’s been pretty well
established that, no, it doesn’t really degrade. Most of it’s going to stay in the soil for hundreds
or thousands of years. It really is a good carbon sequestration pathway. So, now there’s quite a
bit of money in the carbon capture space. Most of the money is going to biochar projects now.
So, that’s really good news for biochar. But to get that money, you’ve got to verify what you’ve
done. So, that means you’ve got to measure how much char you made and, you know, know something
about its properties that it’s well cooked enough that it’s, you know, that most of it’s going to
stay there. It doesn’t have a lot of residual tarry and oily stuff that’s going to actually degrade.
And so, that’s what the Char App is. And we worked out a protocol and a methodology and we’ve written
a paper and have a video on it. So, I’ll give you that link as well. It’s really meant for small
projects. So, it came with this kind of South Africa focus, you know, where they do a lot of
hand work and small, you know, small farms and small projects. And this is a way to aggregate things.
So, say you’ve got a project that’s going to take, it’s going to use six kilns and it’s going to take
10 days, you know, go to a farm, you’re going to process all the material and that amount of time.
So, you’re going to make six batches a day. And so, each kiln you’re going to, first of all,
you’re going to take, you’re barely going to just take pictures and video to verify what you’ve
done. So, you take some pictures of the feedstock, you take a moisture measurement because wet feedstock
isn’t as efficient. So, you want to make sure it’s dry. Then, you take a picture of the kiln
being lit and then take a few videos during the process to make sure that you’ve got flaming
combustion and you’re not making a lot of smoke. Then, at the very end, it’s really easy to figure
out how much char you have made because it’s a cylinder. And so, while it’s, before you put it
out, you level the hot charcoal in the kiln and you just take a measuring stick and measure the
distance from the top of the kiln to the top of the char and then you use a cylinder. So, you know
the diameter, you can get the volume of the char very easily. The sticking point for us was, well,
how do we know about the bulk density to get the mass? Because you need the mass. Once you have the
mass of char, then you can calculate how much CO2 you sequestered because it’s just basically
multiplied by 3.67, which converts carbon to carbon dioxide. So, we figured out a way to get the
dry bulk density because if you put water on it, now you’ve got water. You don’t really know.
So, we take a bucket of hot, burning coals before we put it out and we weigh it and we know the
volume of the bucket and the weight of the coals and we have bulk density. So, that’s how we get
the mass. So, that was very, very clever that one of our members in Biotura, the Woods Network,
figured that out. So, then we put it out and if there’s anything that didn’t get completely burned,
we set that aside and subtract it and that’s it. It’s really simple. So, you do that with a smartphone
app for each of your six kilns and at the end of the day and you upload it all and then you keep
going for the full 10 days and you’ve got all this data all uploaded and then the app will
spit out a report for you. It aggregates it all and then, you know, say you’re a company doing this,
maybe you’ll be doing this for six months and you just keep aggregating the data because you’re
collecting it as you go and it aggregates super easily and then maybe at the end or maybe somebody’s
paying you ahead of time ideally and you just have to show them the receipts. But that’s how we
can aggregate all these small projects and it’s very non-risky. The main thing then is just make
sure that the chart actually went in the ground and didn’t take it somewhere and burned.
Wow. How exciting. I really look forward to learning more about the app and
what you and your colleagues are doing through the Biochar in the Woods
group and Kelpie, it is such a joy to have this opportunity to visit with you for our
podcast discussion and of course, as we wrap up, we’re going to also do our little behind-the-scenes
segment for our ambassador network. Again, folks, if you’d like to join the ambassador network,
just go to yhonours.org and click on the become an ambassador page, get your journey started that way.
And before we wrap up here, Kelpie, I just I want to invite you, if there’s anything else we didn’t,
you know, get to or anything you’d like to share with our audience, please, my friend, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Well, you were asking me some questions earlier about the kind of technical potential of
all this, if we could scale it up. That’s right. Yeah. And so there’s a paper that was published in
2010 that really looked at that. And I think it’s still very valid, kind of doing an inventory of
all the waste biomass, all the degraded land where you could play a purpose-grown biomass,
you know, without impacting any natural ecosystems, and then, you know, a certain amount of energy
you could generate as part of the biochar production process. And what they came up with was that if we
really deployed biochar everywhere, we could sequester 12% of our emissions every year.
Amazing. Perfectuity, but not only that. The other thing is, is that as we keep improving,
adding to soil carbon, improving soils and making them more fertile, we’re going to grow more biomass.
So this creates like a pump, a carbon pump, because the more biomass you grow, the more you
have available to char, the more char you put in the soil, the more biomass you grow. So it’s what
we call a virtuous cycle. And that’s exactly what we need, you know, a self-perpetuating cycle here.
Of course, it’s a huge effort that would have to be, you know, supported at every level in society,
but I think the exciting thing to me about biochar is we don’t have to wait for governments.
We can do it. It’s very much of a ground-up grassroots movement. It is getting support,
you know, from governments, not enough. But like I said, we don’t have to wait. We can, everybody
can do this. And so that’s why I really encourage people to just do it. Amazing. Thank you so much
for sharing that. And it’s so exciting and inspiring. And I love what you spoke to earlier about scaling
out as a way to think about this instead of scaling up with perhaps centralized projects, but instead,
proliferation through community-scale projects might be one of the real keys in all of this.
Yeah, and it’s not just here in the U.S. There’s some really, really exciting work happening in
Africa and in Thailand and Kenya are two places where there’s a lot going on where just adding a
little, you know, people, some places, these places, people have such poor soils and very little
access to fertilizer. And a little bit of biochar can make a huge difference in how much food they
can grow. So the food security aspect of it is very, very important.
Amazing. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Kelpie. Everybody, please get yourself a copy of
Kelpie’s book, The Biochar Handbook from Chelsea Green Publishing. And once again,
Kelpie, thank you for being a guest on our podcast today.
You bet. It was fun. Absolutely. Talk to you, my friend. Bye-bye. Bye.
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