What Is Terra Petra Soils? Can You Make Any Soil Terra Petra Soil? Soil Scientist Opinion.

hello plan people how are you guys doing today if you're new around here my name is Ashley and I'm a soil scientist on this channel I like to take that science and apply to things plans and in today's video we're going to be talking about the Terra PR soils or pretta however you pronounce it literally everyone pronounces it differently I'm going to say pra we're good to go anyways we're going to be applying science to why these soils are so valuable and some of the theories as to how they got there maybe some theories you have never heard about out but our theories nonetheless let's jump right into it so I think the best place to start with this is explaining Amazon soil as a whole outside of the Terra prita areas Amazon forest soil is dead it is dead and it is old and what I mean by that is the age of the soil when we're looking at it from a soil scientist perspective is looking at the last time that soil had been covered by something any and so when we look at North America and we're looking at age of soil we're typically referencing the glacial activity on that land so that could be the physical Glacier being placed on the surface of that land or it could be the river a glacial River glacial fluvial deposit technically that was way too nerdy um so it could be the river off the glacier or it could be glacial lacustrian another nerd term there which would would be a lake bed of an old glacial lake so those are kind of your three main ones there's a ton of other ones but the three main ones and so that's what we're talking about when we're talking about the age of the soil so if we look at North America obviously the direction the glaciers went in was this way so up into Canada and when this happened we had different stages that the land was reliefed of the glacier itself and then over time the Lakes would evaporate and then that land would be released as well so when we look at a map it's not quite a line where the glacier just progressed north or up a mountain it's actually blotchy and when we look at the age of the soil so there's an old lake or an inland sea for example that soil is going to be a bit newer younger than maybe a glacial tail but for the most part we can look at it as line and so let's look at it in that way here today so the Amazon soil obviously I could do literally a whole video on glacial soils and development unit I can do a whole video on that so let me know if you want that so when we look at the Amazon soil it is considered dead and it considered well not dead but it's considered old and when you get an old soil you need a lot of inputs to keep that soil up this is what upsets a lot of climate people plant people soil science people when we're talking about Amazon deforestation if you're deforesting Amazon for lumber whatever the cases and you're replanting the plants or the trees we don't really care that's fine I mean some people will but for the most part whatever as long as the plants are going back into place in the density needed to be able to keep that nice beautiful cycle going however the issue is that when we clearcut these soils for cattle or for farming we end up with a system where we're taking more than we're adding and unfortunately in a rainforest system there is such a balance of input and output that if you disrupt that in any way shape or form and this includes if you DeForest and replant but you don't replant enough you end up with maybe two to three good years out of that soil because that soil has zero nutrient reserve and that is where terraa Tera soil comes in so Tera soil was noticed in Amazon throughout the Amazon as a soil that was able to a retain moisture and B retain cation exchange capacity AKA nutrients AKA EC I mean it has a ton of different names and so I've spoken about biochar before I've spoken about charcoal before and I've noted that the water holding capacity in the neut nutrient holding capacity in a newer soil such as one here in Canada or Northern Us in high quantities if that is applied it's almost too much it can become toxic but in a soil such as the Amazon it's a beautiful thing because you never hit a toxic level in those soils because those soils are so depleted and such have have such a low cting exchange capacity naturally they have a really hard time holding to any nutrients whatsoever so Tera prita isn't charcoal it is actually specifically biochar and so for biochar to be made it has to be burnt is organic material burnt in the absence of oxygen so that's very very specific conditions under which it can be made so that does not mean this is Amazonian natives Mayan going out and having a big bonfire this is very specific stuff but once this product is added to the soil it immediately increases that cine exchange capacity meaning when these heavy rains come through the Amazon the nutrients isn't so quickly washed away and the water holding capacity actually goes up enormously regardless of the volume of biomass on top of that soil surface so this is where I'm going to spice things up a bit maybe with a different concept than what most have presented and my concepts are BAS based off of scientific literature and journals that I've read not so much mainstream hoopla per se so the idea of the terrapro soils has a lot of theory and not a lot of fact and I'm going to get into why that is but just keep that in mind what's said about them and what's actually known about them are two very different things so the first thing being there's no denying the fact that botur mixed into this really sandy old degraded soil surface is valuable there's no arguing that no soil scientist on the face of this planet is going to argue that terus soils are better than the surrounding Amazon soils that's just a fact however there are some discrepancies in where terrapro soil is found so when I say that I mean Terra predus soil has been found in sites that have been excavated where there are man-made objects and there are signs of human activity and community so that soil would indicate that potentially it is manmade meaning that teror predis soil was put there to help support the community of people that supplied those manade objects the second option is that there is no man-made objects there and people have found just terrapro soil in the absence of man-made objects meaning how and why did we end up with terus soil in the middle of the Amazon without any human interference so the first uh Theory as to why there would be areas without man-made objects and with man-made objects is that forest fires would most likely rip through the Amazon this would leave a very clear path in an otherwise very dense forest that would then allow for these individuals to move freely in a naturally cleared landscape and when they moved into a naturally cleared landscape they formulated homes and they eventually grew Gardens and crops they realized that the soil in these cleared or these Forest fire cleared Landscapes was very valuable because it produced more food than the surrounding soils so the first theory is that the humans moved into the areas that the forest fire was had you're probably thinking well Ashley you said they can't just have a bombfire and make this stuff and they can't forest fires are much different than a campfire so we learned this actually in our forest soils class the charcoal left behind after a forest fire is much different than that of even a grass fire the charcoal is a biotar after a forest fire because forest fires burn so hot and so fast that they actually eat up a lot of the oxygen in the area it's to the point that when a forest fire is going it's not uncommon for it to suck oxygen in from the atmosphere around around it and cause a wind an actual gust a sucking wind Into the Fire and almost cause like its own little mini uh Windstorm of sorts and I discussed this actually in my forest fire video but it'll suck in oxygen from the atmosphere around it and sometimes this can be very very strong stuff and so in or near the soil surface a lot of that burnt organic material is burning in the absence of oxygen that makes it biotar regardless of human activity so the next Theory um the thing that kind of debunks it or you know spices it up a bit and makes us reconsider human activity is that the biotar in that area is where there's man-made objects is 3 m very specific 3 m and Incredibly uniform and so anyone who's dug a soil profile in an Old Forest fired landscape you know that it's not even and it's not evenly spread at 3 m so that in and of itself is very odd so my personal experience with digging soils in the the Boreal forest not the Amazon given is that the soil profile usually after after a forest fire even a hundred years after a forest fire you can find charcoal you know 100 years after I've dug up very old forest fires before and you'll notice that there will be a burnt layer of organic material and then the actual uh burnt material underground in the physical soil profile for the most part is roots so big honken roots and you'll see kind of these black fissures going through the soil profile burning out the rude biomass and so that's what it typically looks like but when I look at the terrapro oils given I've never seen a root system of a rainforest soil up close the most I can see is photos and I mean that will only tell you so much it is very uniform um and it's not doesn't look like a natural forest fire formation it's not stringy little Fisher type things it's it is very uniform it's exactly 3 MERS so to say with 100% fact like now these people are just moving on this land after the forest fire comes through is kind of ignorant because anyone who's dug soil profiles in a forest that has been burnt it doesn't look like that that is different in its profile now maybe maybe the plants that grow in a rainforest have a much different root system than that of a boreal forest which is entirely possible and they have more of fibrous root system with a lot of root hairs and a lot of um wise and apical mirror stem uh splitting and so that's what causes that nice uniform look however I doubt it because my understanding in an Amazon rainforest is that a lot of roots are actually kind of on the surface and it's a battle for water because the water goes through the system so fast so it would be not advantageous to have you know a bunch of root biomass 3 meters down into the soil profile because once it's in it's gone uh so the typical and that the rainy season you wouldn't want roots in the soil system because you would have rotting so it makes me think that a majority of the roots would be on the surface which doesn't support the theory so I think the really common issue with the Terra pritus soil which are undeniably valuable and undeniably helped these communities in the Amazon farm and live and and gain these big communities a common issue is that people will make the blanket statement of biochar being mixed into the first three meters of any soil is going to be beneficial and I'm going to say it right now that statement is not true soil is underestimated as this very simple entity but in reality it's kind of its own ecosystem and it's not the same from even one side of a field to the other soil is so complicated that if you apply 3 m of biochar to any soil you are going to end up with a whole lot of different results ranging from a lot of dead plants to really high yield and the reason for that is because subtle changes in even the parent material will change how biochar interacts with that soil even even things such as past history um the management the plants that have been grown on it the environment how much rain it gets are all going to affect whether or not biochar is useful in your garden or in the ecosystem that you are developing I can say for a majority of people that fall into the Great Plains area who have a clay soil or a clay LOM or a lomy soil you probably don't want to do 3 m of biochar it's going to end badly however if you were gardening in the Northern saskat and boreal forest where you have very Sandy soils or if you were an ASI with Saskatchewan I'm just throwing out names of places I know have really sandy soils or if you were out um by Dakota dun's First Nation here in Saskatoon those areas are very Sandy and so you would benefit from the addition of a biochar to that soil you're going to see benefits in nutrient retention water retention you name it and I think the way that I can drive the point home that terita soils are not uniform they're not even the same within the Amazon on itself is that when soil scientists are discussing this topic it's not often that we would say terita soil because even within the Amazon the terita soils are different from one another each one has different attributes some are valuable in producing food while others are not working as well and so we refer to them as soils meaning there's different versions of it and just because you add biochar to a soil does not make it suddenly a Terra prita soil it is a tera soils it falls into the blanket definition of a terita soil but it's not um it doesn't suddenly just make it into that because there are inherent genetic coating for lack of a better term DNA hardwired into soil that ultimately you cannot change and that's just the long and short of it even in the garden I get you guys ask questions about how do I change this how do I fix that how do I and in a lot of cases if you're working with a large land mass there's not much you can do you can management and treat it differently but fixing it isn't possible that is your parent material that is the card you were dealt your only option is to do raise bed and bring soil in if you want to change it absolutely you can but when we're dealing with Farmers even Farmers know how Dynamic soil can be they use things such as prescription uh fertilize mapping now and they base that off of the yields harvested from the year before it gives us lots of feedback as to what the soil may or may not be lacking and even when we test for soil in a field we don't just go to the middle of a field and well there's the soil test we test on a grid depending on how much money you want to spend we'll test on a major grid through the entire field and that's going to tell us the soils within that area and give us a map of the soils in that area so it it's all very very different you can depending on the discussion you're having you can talk about soils on a very large scale so you can talk about uh Brown dark brown black soils like when we're referring to Canada we can talk about soil colors we can talk about parent material soils so we have chemic soils rosolic soils so those are all different types on that side too all of which would fall into different categories and the dark brown brown black and you can even break it down even further from that like if you're in a glacial till soil you can have within just one field different types of soils just in 5T of each other so it's not that simple unfortunately but I hope you guys enjoyed this video I know some of you have definitely requested it you cannot just make a terpret soil out of your back pocket that would be impossible and in a lot of cases it's uh not worth it because you can cause more harm than good and um I don't know how the heck you're going to make biochar on a mass level and unless you burn a whole Forest down that would be very tough to do I've seen methods where it's like a slow burn underground it's kind of like my understanding anyways besides the point if you are in Canada North America if you have a lomy soil a clay soil and anywhere in the world regardless of where you are just skip the St the teroa you you will regret it the moment it happens if you're in a sandy soil though go crazy you'll see SS a benefit to it hope you guys enjoyed this video be sure to give it a thumbs up let me know in the comments down below if you've made some form of terrapro oil um and what you think of it and I will talk to you guys later bye

Channel: Gardening In Canada

Views: 15,318

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Id: 7a7z1wooyms

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021