[Stoves] Stoves Digest, Vol 15, Issue 5

[Geoff Thomas]

On the face of it that argument is fine, but what I have found is that in the wet tropical soils, compost is returned to the atmosphere extremely quickly, ie less than a year, so you have to constantly renew it, whereas with the Bio- char it is virtually permanent.
I guess that is why the Incas etc used Bio char.
Temperate zones may well be better served by compost, it would be good to see some comparative research on it.
Cheers,
Geoff Thomas.
On 03/11/2011, at 1:57 PM, stoves-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:

> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 12:29:04 -0700
> From: "Frank Shields" <frank at compostlab.com>
> To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
> 	<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Char vs. fertilizer
> Message-ID: <006201cc9995$af0d6810$0d283830$@compostlab.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Great question.
> 
> 
> 
> A small amount of plant available nutrients on depleted soils will increase growth of biomass and energy crops. These nutrients are not from fossil source like many inorganic fertilizers.  So I suggest the best means is that organic materials having a high percentage of nutrients are better used to grow more woody plants to be used as fuel.    Charring these materials and we make many nutrients, like P, unavailable and some like K and N go off into the air. Composting these materials further increases the amount of available nutrients by better holding on to the nitrogen and planting may take place immediately -compared to green manures.  
> 
> 
> 
> Reducing fossil fuels (and inorganic fertilizers) and it becomes more important to make best use of our nutrients. So I suggest composting is still the best means to handle ag residues and use the compost to grow woody fuel crops.

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