Worms and Biochar

Wednesday, April 19 was a biochar play day at John Livingston's Tierra Buena Worm Farm. John has set up a complete system to recycle organic wastes into worm castings. He also has a well organized biochar production center. The UBET crew made 46 cubic feet of biochar in about 3 hours, using 3 kilns. And our wood was kind of wet, although dry pallets helped to get it going. Kelpie forgot to bring the propane torch so a lot of ingenuity was needed to light the piles. As usual the UBET crew rose to the occasion.

UBET's collection of biochar kilns at work.

John taught us the secrets of worm wrangling.

Burn Piles: Biochar and Conventional

Here are some pictures of burn piles on the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest, burned in December 2015. Some were done the conventional way, with the objective of incinerating as much biomass as possible. Others were top-lit and then extinguished with water in order to preserve the charcoal. You can see that the conventional method burned the organic soil layer down to mineral dirt and rocks. Nothing grows there now, and where the piles were on slopes, erosion has started.

In contrast, biochar burn piles have new sprouts of ferns, wildflowers and other plants.

Field Trials Established!

As part of UBET's NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant, we are establishing field trials to test biochar compost on several farms. The first field trial was set up last fall at Michaels Ranch. Now we have two more, Don Morrison's pasture and a new pasture at Daisy Hill Farm planted with mixed forage species for pastured poultry. We managed to grab a few sunny days between rains to get these field trials established. Here are some pictures:

Don Morrison's pasture gets a biochar treatment

At Daisy Hill Farm we mixed a biochar compost with some plain biochar

Applying the biochar compost mixture

These bins have alpaca manure with different amounts of biochar. They will be used in a veggie bed field trial at Siskiyou Alpaca. We will be planting 60 row feet of bok choy next weekend. Get ready for stir fry!