Biochar Inoculation with Dan Hettinger

[Music] this is compost tea this has been brewing since about four o'clock yesterday so we're a little over 24 hours I'll get into the nitty-gritty of this on the presentation I say nitty gritty I said it's gonna be kind of rapid-fire we're gonna try to cover a whole lot in an hour and a half I always do this like try to squeeze in too much but I didn't want to show this so I could cut it off and then we'd have some quiet inside but what I'm doing is two different aerated compost teas here that we can use to inoculate biochar this is a method for taking the microbes that are inside compost or inside worm castings or whatever kind of starter material you want to use and then you feed it some sugars and feed it some other micronutrients and then you're gonna bubble that compost with air for a certain amount of time at a certain temperature and I would recommend that you start with the recipe and you try to stick to it as close as possible I'm happy to share the recipe that I got so what I've been doing is compost here alfalfa meal fish meal molasses liquid fish I've got some minerals azomite this stuff called c90 I've got two different systems that I made this is the one that I did last year that if you look at it it's just a bucket with holes punched in through the bottom and then there's slightly smaller holes than the outside diameter of this tube so I really kind of squeeze those in there real tight and it actually gets a little bit of a swirl effect going so what I can do is actually just dump everything into the bucket which is nice I do get some little pockets of compost kind of building up in these inside corners it's also a little messy so I switched over to the new kind of more common system over here one thing about bubbling all this air into it it's a prevention the safeguard against anaerobic microbes which are generally your disease-carrying microbes not all in robes but but of the ones that you need to be worried about 99% of them are anaerobes so that's why we go through all this great effort of actually bubbling air into the system so only aerobic microbes can survive that's pretty important so what will happen now that I've cut this off is I might have about an hour before my populations and microbes in here will start to crash completely what I wanted to do was go ahead and shut the air off so we can have a nice quiet presentation and we'll actually just go ahead and soak some biochar right now all right this is the other system here probably the more common system that you're going to see involves a little air inlet that's actually manifold it down here I've built this thing out of a sea PVC pipe and then I went through and I drilled all these little holes down here so this air comes in it actually just kind of bubbles out in a nice like 12 part manifold and then I've got these little bags I forget what these are normally used for but I did find these at Ingalls pretty nice I put all my ingredients into the bag and then it just steeps it's not like a violent rolling bubble like this I suspect that I'm gonna have a little bit better results with this because it's not quite so violent it's like a nice gentle roll they might have a nice like microbial rich fungal rich compost that goes in but what I suspect is happening is I'm taking formal strands and just tear them all apart you know in this case I think the fungal strands are probably pretty well gently being massaged in this little bag that we have here yeah yeah exactly yeah so again but these these are made with identical recipes with the exception of some high high tech designer microbes that we added to one of these and we did some comparisons on the microscope in the 24 hours Tom we really didn't notice any kind of difference yet if anything the designer microbes may have some effect where they're actually kind of like it looks like the microbes are clumping together for some reason or another so it's a interesting point is and I'm gonna like to stress this over and over again is that you probably don't need to go after the fancy designer microbes for the most part you can do this if you're doing worm castings or compost and you're good at it then that would be a sufficient source of microbes for inoculated biochar I do I do yeah it started to skip ahead so we'll go in and do the presentation all this will make a lot more sense an hour from now so so what I want to do is go ahead and soak some biochar and go ahead and get this stuff good because remember I said populations are likely to die haven't fed them in a while all right so this is char that we got right off of our system not screened at all actually in most cases if we're gonna sell this char I would try to maybe screen it down about quarter inch or so this stuff has a pretty good profile except for some random nuggets that get through that might be like an inch or inch and a half even sometimes if you pull those out if I notice it during this process it's a good chance those are gonna float this piece of equipment behind you here you know we're dealing with quantities where we might make up to two yards today crush biochar we use same shredder vacuum that you see on some of these landscaping trailers we seen where the guys go around in the city and they'll suck up leaf piles yeah we used one of those so that's a good indicator if our biochar is good or not it's really one of our first indicators is is it light enough to be picked up by the vacuum and if it's not light enough it's chances are that it's not completely cooked so I'll start with that and then right now I'm just going to dump out this tea and just kind of let it sit for a little bit see how much that absorbed already biochar is actually hydrophobic at first you know often when you first make it could be that it has really tiny pockets of air inside of it that'll cause it to float sometimes it could also be that during the process that tars can actually recondense on the char when it's finished especially in these batch retort systems that most people are doing if anybody's doing this in 55-gallon drums there's a good chance and when you're done that tars will reconvince on the biochar and actually plug holes what we do is wet it it's the process called wedding where water makes its way into those little pores forces oxygen out and then it's more likely to take on microbes and nutrients after that so this stuff's been sitting around for a very long time this char is actually probably I want to say six months old so it's already wedded if this was brand new made it yesterday char there's a good chance a lot of it would be floating right now you don't have to wet it right away yeah with the compost tea yeah you want it if you're gonna cut the air off on your compost tea compass tea gets incredibly complicated but when you cut the air off you have a pretty limited amount of time before microbe populations start to die off and the idea with compost tea is to take a starter compost and then grow the organisms out like you want to take you you can multiply the microbes that are in compost something like a thousand fold just by feeding it molasses and then bubbling air into it for a prescribed amount of time I do have some links to a compost tea manual if anybody gets really into this I'd be happy to share that with you I bet we could do a whole day on just compost tea alone okay so I'm gonna let that sit for a little while you guys want to start the presentation okay so we're talking about conditioning biochar I'm gonna go through a little bit of definitions here first and then we'll get into some real really practical at-home ways to do this biochar is biomass wood in our case that's been heated up in a limited oxygen environment and basically what you're doing at that point is making charcoal we generally heat it up a little bit further than what most commercial charcoal makers are doing so what we're trying to do is drive everything in the wood that's not carbon out and then simultaneously what happens is the carbon structure inside the wood rearranges and now what we have is this really persistent non biodegradable carbon sponge basically that works on a microbial level it's incredibly small pores it's pretty fascinating so what makes biochar so fascinating is those two qualities it's incredibly porous and it resists microbial degradation in the soil literally for hundreds of years if not thousands of years very absorptive so what that means is that nutrients can actually stick to the walls of biochar and and and stay there and can serve as microbial or plant food so it has a buffering capacity in that manner they are sometimes alkaline I've measured biochar that we've made here in one of our systems that has a pH as high as nine so consider that if you're adding that to soils that that would not benefit from further alkaline in again we usually crush it and screen it to about quarter inch or so would save the larger nuggets and REE crush it again here's that picture under the electron microscope what we're talking about today is three different things we're talking about biochar which is a substrate right it's just a house think of it as a house for nutrients and microbes follow the nutrients into the house and what they have is a protected environment from disruptions from outside so like heavy water events or drought and disturbance in the soil like tilling or over fertilizing under fertilizing biochar is going to have a neutralizing effect on all of those what happens when we put biochar directly in the soil without charging it if I was to go out into my garden and apply 5% biochar to my topsoil chances are I'm not gonna have a very good crop next year because it's going to come in and it's going to pull all the nutrients in my topsoil it's gonna hold on to them it may take a year it may take two years to recover and that's if I have good soil with high organic matter and a nice microbial population in it already dead soils damaged soils it's not likely to do much of anything until it has microbes in it and something to eat so again that's what we're talking about nutrients microbes don't forget that nutrients and microbes biochar is interesting because you can get into this really heady science where you can have a specific plant or a specific type of plant with specific needs and you can use biochar as the vehicle for delivery specific nutrients and specific microbes to that specific soil ecosystem that you're trying to build what probably won't get into that too much the compost tea brewing manual describes that in some detail if anybody's interested happy to share it's important to note that in most cases nature will correct itself like I said you can apply it raw just be prepared to wait and have a pretty disappointing crop for maybe a couple of years who's sort of indigenous microbes I talk about these designer microbes and building specific soils and that kind of thing now there's a good chance that the microbes in your soil are going to out-compete all these fancy microbes that were loading in to the biochar indigenous microbes is certainly something to look at basically has something to do with sourcing good soil in a environment similar to the one that you're trying to recreate so the example that I hear all the time is growing blueberries if you want to grow blueberries go find somebody that has a healthy blueberry crop and ask if you can borrow a little bit of their soil okay so you're gonna be sourcing microbes that are symbiotic with blueberry crops soil food web it's the complex relationship between soil organisms basically what we're going to be looking for today in regards to biochar is diversity every step of the way we're going to try to add diversity and that is really what's fundamental to the soil food web where if something affects nematodes in this soil food web that there's another organism that will come in there and kind of fill its place and that it's a complex relationship where we can deal with a little bit of disruption drought and excessive rain over application of fertilizers whatever guidelines here throughout the rest of the class we're going to consider nutrients and microbes diversity char needs to be wedded okay we already discussed that the char is a hydrophobic at first now what happens if you take char that hasn't been wetted and you want to top dress around your apple trees yeah okay well that's good I was going to say might float away yeah it's a big rain event you're just gonna see it wash down the you know down the gully yeah but you know if it gets wedded through periodic light rains then then you're probably gonna be okay application rate so I'll just go ahead and discuss that I've heard wildly different recommendations for application rate it's kind of depending on who you are if you're like a down-home farmer making your own biochar and buckets or if you're like you know Cornell University scientists you're gonna have different recommendations one to ten percent by volume you're probably not gonna get much of an effect over ten percent by volume anywhere okay so just kind of keep that in mind moving forward again we're going to maintain aerobic conditions whenever possible so here's just a little tip for you guys that are making it at home is yeah I know some of you guys have these systems where you've got drones where you can let it cool off you don't actually have to quench it and there are some systems where you need to be there to quench it or else it's going to just smolder and turn to ash I would recommend if you have the opportunity to quench it so what happens when you pour water over hot coals you for one you're going to create a ton of steam so be careful it's going to be incredibly dangerous but that steam is going to come inside and it's going to is going to enter those little pores in the biochar and it's going to crack them out even further and in some cases remember I talked about the tars that might convince some bar it's going to actually in some cases possibly dissolve those tars and wash them out so you what you're going to end up is this wedding and cracking process all in one that'll make your char way more absorptive it's actually a process of how they make activated carbon which is in like a Brita filter or fish tanks commonly used activated carbon steam cracking is one way to make activated carbon something you can do that gets really interesting is you can take like a soluble mineral additive like c90 remember I mentioned sea 90 outside that's a collection of something like two hundred different ocean minerals that have been dried and you can add a tablespoon of c90 I think it's two five gallon bucket and use that water to quench your char and now what you're doing is injecting sea minerals into the deepest pores of the Charak is pretty interesting that's what I do in my compost tea is one tablespoon to five gallons we're talking about conditioning that's preparing biochar for soil application through nutrients microbes minerals broadly speaking microbes are micro organisms when I'm talking about microbes I'm talking about soil life quantity diversity of microbial life arabs are those that require oxygen anaerobes required the absence of oxygen in the most cases remember we're going to try to avoid interrupts facultative or those that can actually switch between the two when I talk about nutrients I mean microbial foods or plant foods we're going to talk a lot about organic matter which is human or little tiny bits of plants microbes included the waste from microbes all of this is organic matter in the soil cover crops exudates yeah our experience was that not charging it but plants putting it out with very diverse cover crops that have been inoculated with both my cries aloud try to happen in the soil way more quickly than we expected within six months so diverse diverse cover crops after the fact even if you don't get charged you might get away with it don't quote me on that we've seen it once okay the easiest way to do compost or to do biochar inoculation this is across the board a lot of times if you're gonna go and you're gonna try to buy biochar what its gonna be is biochar that has been mixed with compost okay so what we can do is take a handful of biochar fresh off the machine and a handful of compost and we can take them and just mix them all up together okay there's a couple of things to factor in when you're doing this for one it has to be a bright moisture and that moisture is generally described as as the in the squeeze test if you can take that ball of charcoal biochar and compost and you can squeeze it just to the point where a little bit of water comes through your fingers that's the right moisture okay if you can get it to that point with moisture and you can keep it warm and you can keep it in a aerobic environment you know don't put it in a sealed bucket but keep it in like a perforated bag something like that and then eventually in time maybe over the course of a couple of weeks you're gonna have inoculated biochar you're gonna have nutrients you're gonna have microbes in one step absolutely the easiest way to do it a copy out there is that how do you know that you have good compost really hard to tell a lot of inferior compost out there making compost is difficult making it right is pretty difficult not at all something we're going to be able to talk about today again wait a few weeks you know you can't use your biochar tomorrow if you do it this way I say that from experience I've done this a handful of times and I have done it enough and get willy nilly enough about it that I've definitely seen some inferior results by a fine biochar in the first year this way almost always these days I'm taking biochar and I'm using some sort of liquid nutrient source or biological inoculant first and then I'm going to add it to my compost right biochar it's it is really hard to wrap your head around how absorptive biochar really is but it can hold and suck in a lot of nutrients and I'll say point in case this thing in the back here we've had that run in for about two months now that is our aquaponics system that we're we're experimenting with Al Capone X is where you grow fish and you've got two plants in the same closed-loop system where the fish waste goes to feed the plants I've had fish in there for almost two months and last week I pulled all the plants out because there's no nutrition in there that bout that things and what I'm doing is using biochar as a substrate to grow the plants on and that biochar is just sucking in all of the plant weight or the fish waste none of it is available to the fish or to the plants right now okay so that's two months of having fish in there feeding it waste I can get in there with my little test files no ammonia no nitrates no nitrites nothing is available to the plants they look terrible so I just pulled them out what I'm gonna do is just give that probably a couple of months to actually charge you up I've got some interesting theories about maybe using biochar this is side note we've got a really over fertilized pond at the other farm what I want to do is take biochar and have some sort of system where I can take that over fertilized water and just bubble it through the biochar take that biochar load it with pond nutrients then bring it over here and use it in my closed-loop fish system so that's one clever way to clean up and load biochar using my fish when I'm done with that system I've got inoculated charge biochar that I can add to compost or probably just add directly to soils you don't really have to let it sit you got to cool it off it can't be hot yeah you're gonna want to charge it or knock you late it first and then you can put it directly yeah I mean certain processes are gonna have longer times so the one I'm talking about now with compost you're going to want to let it sit and go through a composting phase that may take a week or two for microbes to move in so if you're just going to mix it with compost get moisture right get heat right and make sure it has adequate air movement [Music] exactly for those of you guys who aren't competent on you may know that compost at home is a lot easier when you've got a large mass if I'm gonna compost at home I do it once a year and I do it in a large like two or three yard mass it's the last time I mow the grass and it's when I harvest and I clean up my garden and it's right when the leaves start to fall so I try to do that all at once and then I can get two or three yards of material and then I can throw a raw biochar in there and go through that whole process one last note speaking from experience is that you know I mentioned you can do a one to one ratio compost to raw biochar in most cases all there on the side of caution now that I've seen that not work for me and I'll add more compost so I'd really do like a three to one now and if I've got a three to one compost and biochar bucket for a four gallon bucket let's make that easy I've got one gallon of biochar so remember I can add 1 to 10 percent biochar pop volume to my garden you you're talking about that one gallon of biochar okay you might have four gallons quantity but it's only one gallon about eight or just for fun we've got a microscope here on the farm I did take a picture of our compost this is the compost that we have here so what I've done is actually screen that through quarter-inch this guy here and turns out real nice I don't know if you guys want to mess with it'll make your hands so Brown if you touch it a really nice texture nice fungal activity that's what we're looking for and as much as possible in our compost that's because that was never hard to get we got a little picture of a nice little fungal strand right here remember I was talking out there I've shown you my compost tea bubblers and one has this really violent bubble in the real violent bubble this thing will be all shredded to bits this might be from the violent bubble because that's not a very long fungal strand and that looks like a little bit of fungal trend over there off in the edge you'll see that I told you how compost once a year you know I generated food waste every single day I do want to spend a little time on this worm composting because I'm a huge fan of it how are you doing it they're fickle little creatures at first that's that's been my experience is that it takes a minute to get them established once they get Rocking there I mean you can feed them all day long and it's it's a nice system it's it's scalable you can do it as small as this you could probably do it smaller than that or you can scale up to these large wooden bins I for one like multiple small bands because I can move them around I'll move these outside under my shady back porch in the summertime and once you get it going it doesn't stink at all actually I just move them into my basement six months out of the year they live in my basement they do need that you know comfortable range of temperature I'll try to keep them above 55 don't let it get too hot I kept them in my garage my garage gets up to 80 degrees or so it gets a lot of Sun if you leave the door open I absolutely cooked my worms before by getting too hot Moisture manager is critical if you feed them too much food scraps at once or you get the the from a fillip compost going where you actually start to generate heat you can cook your worms that way as well so it's a tricky system once you get it right it gets really easy you can upload Airy in it you cannot put fat you cannot put citrus salty foods spicy foods just stay away from them this compost system again it does not get hot you're relying on the worms in this case to to be your your pathogen reducers so the way that you manage it from keeping it from heating up is more carbon than usual I for one alternate between two sources of grit worms in this bucket they need a something they're just like chicken I might be wrong on this but I think I'm right like a chicken's gizzard requires a little bit of grit to chew its food I believe that worms operate the same way yeah so um so what I like to do is just occasionally maybe once a month or something I'll drop in a little bit of a gritty material either of rock dust like a mineralized rock dust or or the crushed eggshells so these are eggshells what I'll do most of Tomas if I've got enough eggshells although either like stick them on the wood stove or sometimes even in the microwave for a minute and just zap all the bacteria on those eggshells that have been sitting around for a couple of weeks and then get them nice and dry and I'll just pulverize them into this um this is actually a lot of shells you know that's probably 12 dozen eggshells in there and I'll just take a little bit and just sprinkling in there occasionally now I read preparing for this class I read that the calcium in the eggshells it's actually a buffer for organic acid organic acid is another one of those indicators that if your bedding gets too acidic your worms are gonna leave right and it gets acidic when you overfeed it so it's just any kind of buffer that you can have to to neutralize that soil in there make your worms happy payoff if I've got a lot of veggies I'll chop them up into small bits before I put them in there I like to take that extra step don't put like your mango pit in there warm never gonna eat a mango pit okay this is my system at home and I brought in one of these buckets I've got four buckets most of the time I'm only using two of them this one's full to the brim right now this one I just harvested a lot out of when I did all my spring planting in my garden and it's that one right there so it's nice and light this it's finished worm castings so if I get a full bucket like this a lot of times if I don't need those worm castings right away I'll screen them and then I'll just store them in here I'll leave a couple of worms in there just to keep it nice and aerated and then this is the overs from that process when I screen it this stuff that goes through the screen goes here the stuff that goes stays on top of the screen it goes in here and then I'll use this whenever I start a new band I'll use the microbes that are all over the overs and then and then try to inoculate a new band so let me show you what I got here if anybody wants to stand up and look at this I'm happy to happy to show you a lot of times what I'll do is add food to one side so I'm guessing I added for you to this side and I'll do that by taking the worm bin and kind of turning it up and putting it over there and then I'll sprinkle my food in there try not to overload it again you can't you okay with the experience you'll get to know when you ever light it and then I'll take something like my eggshells just kind of sprinkle it in there that's gonna be earthworms and those have to be specific one yeah that's a good question yeah so I use red wigglers yeah that's like if you go to any bait shop or any of these gas stations that sell bait you can just ask for red wigglers or you can just ask me if you want some red wigglers oh well harvest them tonight for you take your time they grow really fast too so if you get a little bit you know they they're there they are yeah see them down there yeah so they're staying down low now [Music] well that's a really good question - and I'm to be honest I'm not sure that I really know other than what I can just see I don't see bits of food anymore I see a really consistent texture um it's fine it doesn't stink you know in some cases if you get it wrong you'll get a little puck it's a moisture down in the bottom of this they kind of do stink see how it actually looks a little wetter down there at the bottom see I don't know Wow my worms want to stay down there at the bottom that's a something to pay attention to at all yeah yeah yeah and a lot of times what I'll do is screen it and then for the most part the worms will stay on top of the screen then I'll try to add them back in if I can [Music] well this banished like three years old now I'll show you what up what I'm using now is and you're gonna hate me for this is finely shredded leaves we we built a shredder out here and one thing I did was last year just kind of testing the shredder out on different materials I had big bags of leaves partially rotted leaves leftover from a prior year so it's already partially rotted ran that stuff through the shredder and it's like so nice yeah it's perfect yeah I started out with just right a cardboard a I mean this system was started on cardboard so again what I'll normally do is is I'll take this stuff and I'll push it off to the side like that I'm gonna get it all mixed up now I'll add my food and then I'll just take that and I'll just roll it right back over and what I end up with is a little section over here off on the side that won't have any food mixed into it so I can take ya from over here usually I can get something that doesn't have any food see that's the seed that tried to germinate I would call this dawn I would take that and screen it right now and call that done yeah yeah weird little bit see that's a butternut squash stem right there that kind of stuff that's why you skirted cuz that never it never decomposed in here and I mean it might eventually another thing that I'll do is just uh throw some cardboard over the top of it I find that especially at first that helps keep the bugs from laying eggs on it like little flies come in there also get one of these shovels man that's great I got this had a Northern Tool from the kids section for my son and I immediately stole it from a couple things about this bin if you're curious I've got little sixteenth inch holes drilled around the lid I've got actually quarter inch holes on the bottom and then I've got a little sixteenth inch holes around the top here too that's all you got to do and then you might want to factor in something like some sort of a pan because it does drip over time it's good for plants sure yeah absolutely yeah absolutely you can use that to further inoculate biochar kind of you know it's it's not going to have the microbial population that compost tea does but it will certainly be nutrient rich absolutely good stuff yeah I would show you this this is one that we started up more recently and we leave it here and we don't feed it very often I mean we just don't have the the food scrubs we don't generate the food scraps here at launch every day to put in here but a lot of pressure a lot of newer that's the leaves that I'm talking about it's a pretty nice stuff worms are starting to grow in here but nowhere near the population that I have here still doesn't stink none of that what's that yeah yeah the worms aren't gonna eat dirt you know yeah so you want to give them something to eat and I for one if I if I have the opportunity to I'd like to use the waste product if I can [Music] please yeah I'm Pat you have anything to add to that well okay so you have no floor on the bin so that's a fine way to let cell biology do the do the trick camp the thing about this system is that it doesn't have a way to ensure you have just castings and that actually I teach all the time that it's not compost tea to take leachate out because you have no way of knowing if the liquid coming fall all the food waste has gone through the worms got the worms gut totally eats all the microbes they actually feed on the microbes and wipe the cabbages so there are no pathogens that you put in there there's no problem if you have to have something to like you know came off somebody's playing and they happen to have salmonella or something that could then be in there and it wouldn't get eliminated unless you were sure you had nothing but the castings and so that's the one problem with these small systems that you tend to have to like keep disturbing them or you have a big system you just let the stuff sit there until the worms have left it and then I'm pop you know you have worm castings because they look like nothing but little round teeny teeny boss because they've all gone to a worms God so to be sure you don't have pathogens that being sure that it whatever using went to worms gut is what you use that's how to do it the problem with the leachate if you can't be sure that certainly it'll feed plants but you may have pathogens so you may consider that you treat it like ramen you're not worried about that then there's no problem just feel like rotting or doesn't touch then you're home free usually when it's this wet you really can't shake it or roll it or anything just clump but I just gently massage it try not to cut up my little worms that are in there right now and what I end up with is a really nice fine textured stuff and this is what I use to start my compost tea at most of the time my compost at home would never be this good so I end up with a lot of little mud balls and stuff like this if anybody wants to I'm happy to just you know if anybody wants to try to start this at home or anything then uh take these worms how long will the microbe stay alive once you stop beating like you have people have been and you put it away the nutrients stay around I don't know I imagine they stick around for a long time as long as there's organic matter in there for them to feed on as long as they have something to eat I think they're gonna stick around maintain conditions right you know keep it you know at a moderate temperature give it air that's why I said that I like to leave a little bit of worms in my finished worm castings so it doesn't you know have any kind of tendency to collapse on itself or anything not even sure that it would but I just do that as a safeguard yeah I don't think it'll get bad unless you close it off to air completely the one thing to watch out for is letting it dry out yeah dries out down wow those microbes are gonna die and the rest are gonna be quite dormant okay I think we covered that good [Music]

Channel: Living Web Farms

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Length: 39min 0sec (2340 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 25 2018