In the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin,” a captive girl is saved from death by a little man who can spin straw into gold. He asks for her firstborn son in return, of course, but in the end things turn out OK for almost everyone. Except the little man. But he did have an anger management problem.

We're hoping the eventual price of an idea to turn Douglas County's woody waste into oil isn't quite as high. And we're intrigued by the possibilities, although admittedly the actual economic benefits — costs versus return — have yet to be penciled out.

This ambitious documentary/drama/animation hybrid stars Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in the devastated world of the future, asking the question: "Why didn't we stop climate change when we still had the chance?" He looks back on footage of real people around the world in the years leading up to 2015 before runaway climate change took place. IMDB Support Spanner Films & Buy the full DVD Movie with Extra Quality & Content

Chelsea Green:There are plenty of books out there on organic farming. (It's true--just check out our bookstore!) But there aren't a lot of books on the actual nuts-and-bolts business of organic farming. Richard Wiswall is changing that. Huffington Post

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/13/manchester-report-biochar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/manchester-report

Peter Hirst brought his 70 gallon stainless steel biochar retort to Warner, NH and showed us how to burn 100 pounds of wood into 30 pounds of biochar. That's enough for a few beds in our garden after we grind it up and mix it with an equal amount of compost to innoculate the biochar with soil bacteria. But the biochar pioneers are scrambling to find economical and efficient furnaces that can produce tons of the material.
Biochar was first discovered by Amazonian Indian societies a thousand years ago (terra preta), and rediscovered a decade or so ago by modern cultures desperate for ways to improve soil fertility. The new biochar retorts, such as this one that Peter demonstrates, burn biomass with high efficiency and also produce charcoal which can be added to soils, sequestering that carbon more or less permanently. The secret is wood gasification. For more curiously local perspectives, visit http://curiouslylocal.com

Making charcoal in Pennsylvania. Charcoal was the fuel in many iron furnaces until the conversion to coal.

Biochar increases crop productivity in many tropical soils. The reasons probably include improved water retention, reduced leaching, and better availability of nutrients to plant roots. In temperate conditions, studies have been fewer in number and haven’t produced results that are as clear. A new study adds usefully to our knowledge.

Alfred Gathorne-Hardy and colleagues at Imperial College, London applied varying amounts of biochar and of nitrogen fertiliser to barley. Their research showed that biochar improved yields substantially but only in those trials when large amounts of artificial fertiliser were also applied. Adding 20 tonnes a hectare (2 kg a square metre) of biochar to a soil fertilised with 100 kg of nitrogen a hectare increased the crop yield by over 30%. Loosely put, biochar improves the effectiveness of the nitrogen. But for soils with no added fertiliser, increasingly heavy applications of biochar tended slightly to reduce the crop yield.

Carbon Commentary

Biochar is made by heating organic waste like wood and plant clippings to high heat in the absence of air. This is also known as pyrolysis. The volatile components escape as gases and can be burned to produce the energy to keep the pyrolysis going. There is also an energy benefit, 20 percent more energy is produced than the process requires, so this can be used for powering plant and machinery etc.