Four Scientists on Natural Farming: Proof, Biochar, Minerals

1:22:28 Ted Radovich: So I'm actually not a soil biologist. I do a lot of work with vegetable quality, crop quality. We work with a whole group of folks to address issues related to specifically organic ag, but more broadly sustainable as well. A whole bunch of groups working together. We get a lot of support from Western SARE. Stacy's here. I saw Stacy earlier, a representative from the SARE Sustainable Ag Research and Extension. Department of Ag, College of Tropical Ag, a whole bunch of folks working together. When we talk about soil fertility, we're really talking about soil health as was

1:23:12 mentioned previously. Cover crops are incredibly important. We do a lot of work with covers. I'll talk briefly about that. Not just for near-term and more importantly long-term benefits, but it really, cover crops really enhance the ecological function of the whole system with beneficial insect habitat. The rhizosphere is just leaking all kinds of exudates and stimulates soil biology. Compost is a effective way to really add very quickly some of the more stable organic matter components and we've done a lot of work with compost, talked

1:23:49 briefly about that. And then we always work with high nutrient fertilizers as well because they need to be included. I have ten minutes right? Yeah. Make it quick. This is kind of what our lab does. Historically we do a lot of quality analysis looking at the links between how you farm and how that impacts flavor, nutrient density, things like that, and Jana is big on that too and she'll talk about that. But the needs when we look to see you know what people are interested in is you know soil quality. This is we're doing a lot of work with

1:24:26 kō, and sugarcane was brought up earlier and it was wonderful to see the sugarcane juice. A lot of interest in sugarcane varieties as a horticultural crop juice and things like that and so we're doing that kind of work. But with regard to soil fertility and health there's big need for that especially with regard to local fertilizers and that's why natural farming is is has has created so much interest and it's important. Is there a way to dim these lights a little bit? It's not critical I guess. But bottom line here, there's a couple of soils.

1:25:03 We work in a wide range of soils and as you know, Hawaii soils are very distinct. Can be very complex, but we have extremes of very weathered, fairly infertile soils like this Ultisol on the left and the Mollisol on the right, naturally much more fertile. Typically with pH being important, so these are some of the chemical indicators of health or quality indicators. Typically if you look at something like aluminum where aluminum toxicity can be an issue with that lower pH on that Ultisol, it's more plant soluble. This is all plant available

1:25:42 in parts per million for the phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, aluminum. So big difference in the soil, so we work with a lot of different soils to see you know, how these amendments might respond differently in different systems. And so this is, we do do a lot of work with cover crops. And this has got, you can see the little purple lablab in there with the sunn hemp. And this is Waimānalo, that's the pali up above it. We have four acres of certified organic land out there. We work statewide, and so some of you may have attended the cover crop field day

1:26:19 in the wintertime of Waimea a year or so ago. And so there's the sunn hemp, kind of the superstar of the low elevation legumes. And the fava beans or the bell beans for higher elevation do pretty well, especially in the wintertime. So there's a number of cover crops that do better at higher elevation like Waimea, up Kula, especially when temperatures drop in the wintertime. So, you know, nitrogen fixation is important. People get really excited about it. And cover crops are so much more. Grasses are very important, even though they don't necessarily add much nitrogen to the system.

1:27:00 But a lot of folks look at rhizobia and the importance of cover cropping. So these are some of the crops and the nodules we deal with. we've done a lot of different work with with different cover crops you know one of the points and i don't know if you can see that top sentence but some of our tropical legumes most of our tropical legumes nodulate fairly easily with our native bacteria so things like sunn hemp, perennial peanut, which is being shown here, cowpea will nodulate naturally but those you saw those um chemical profiles the nutrient holding capacity the um characteristics

1:27:45 of the soil that that might make it very poor to hold nutrients also creates a poor environment for microbes so you typically don't have as vibrant uh microbial population in these weathered depleted soils and so even though if you were to add inoculum on a if you add biology to legumes and put them in a rich soil you get no real difference in growth performance or nodule size nodule number but when you do it in these more poor weathered soils those that have it have been depleted even though the bacteria are there you get a big difference in the nodule size it's not direct proof of

1:28:26 fixation but certainly plant growth and establishment and then the color of the nodule which I showed earlier can indicate whether or not it's fixing so we do recommend adding some biology if you're starting with a poorly weathered soil but if you build with organic materials that's less of an issue and that's the primary way to build the soil so we do a lot of work with compost and I split compost up in different ways and we talk about some of these larger commercial operations that can produce a very good quality product and then you

1:28:59 have these smaller operations usually on-farm operations that produce a product that called a handcrafted artisan compost you know they spend a lot of time and energy trying to make this real high-end product that's fabulous huge microbial we have huge differences in microbial activity in these different compost tremendous differences and the challenge though it takes a lot of time and energy to do that even if you're making your own. And so you would use those more strategically. So we work with a lot of growers with the, using

1:29:30 the commercial green waste base type compost, maybe adding a little bit of the tankage material that comes out of island commodities that fish, meat, and bone material to jack up the nitrogen a little bit so you don't get immobilization and you increase a little bit more biological activity. But the vermicompost and the more handcrafted composts are used often either as compost extracts or as seedling media. And so you can use a very strategically apply that material and you can see big differences. And the quality is you know is expressed we call this bioassay. This is a difference in a

1:30:06 hundred percent compost that's got a CN ratio that's higher than it should be. it's a little too woody so addressing it with a little bit of nitrogen again from an organic source can adjust that or just making sure that it's matured before using and then you got something that's well matured a nice vermicompost that you know these eggplants are planted at the same time in so it's important to pay attention to quality of the the compost side by side they were planted at the same time. Yeah, yeah. Yes ma'am? Yeah, I haven't done much

1:30:43 natural farming so I'm just talking about some of the stuff that we've done and we work with Dr. Wang, who'll be talking later, and so I don't, I don't haven't done much natural farming actually so I was asked just to come and talk a little bit about some of the other things that we've done so sorry about that so we've done quite a bit with extracts compost tea a lot of stuff published in referee journals and then we try to synthesize it into something a little more accessible to practitioners. And so we have this available online. If you just Google this, it'll pop up.

1:31:11 Compost quality is all in the front. Biological activity is a big part of the book, and there's quite a bit of data in there. So that's.

1:31:18 Audience: the thing about not using molasses in compost teas?

1:31:21 Ted Radovich: Yeah, so sure. So we actually don't necessarily advocate foods in general in the compost teas. Specifically, the molasses, what people are concerned about is simple sugars will rapidly increase certain bacteria at the expense of other, and so you'll shift the biological diversity, you'll minimize it, reduce it, and so most folks now who do use foods, microbial enhancers, recommend blends where simple sugars are eliminated or a very small portion, and so humic acids are very common, like that material you have, kelp extracts and things like that, And the idea is to stimulate biology.

1:32:03 What we found, though, is that really the most important component is the biological activity that's occurred in the compost prior to application. If you've got that, that's really all you need. You can see some differences when you use other material, but it's unpredictable. And so we don't have good recommendations for foods. And if you're using foods, and I'm turning this into a compost tea talk, I'll keep moving. But if you're using foods, you really have to aerate and you have to really pay attention to that. If you're not using microbial enhancers, you can get away with not aerating.

1:32:37 It takes a little bit longer and the instructions are all in here. So it's a little bit complex. So there's actually quite a lot of opportunity for science in this area. And one of the reasons I was not nearly as brave as Koon-Hui, Dr. Wang, to get involved with Korean natural farming, because it is a whole system and it is very complex and everything is. And so for scientists who are used to breaking things down, more challenging, you know. So, questions? So the compost tea, and I'm wrapping up here, I'm almost done, really worked great.

1:33:12 And there's three mechanisms that we figured is causing this plant growth promotion. There are quite a bit of micronutrients, especially that are in the tea that may be enhancing. although the enhanced growth that we saw wasn't explained totally by that. We did see quite a bit of gibberellic acid number four (GA4) that was in our compost that were the most stimulating and there was a strong correlation between. And so it's basically a microbial byproduct that acts as a plant growth stimulant and what it does is it stimulates root growth. And so in addition to some additional micronutrients,

1:33:50 we suspect that the plant was able to intercept what nutrients are already there because roots aren't 100% efficient in intercepting what's available, right? And then finally, and I'll show a slide here on enhanced biological activity, we don't break down the, it's hard work, and there's a lot we don't know about soil biology, but we do do basic measures like respiration, which NRCS does quite a bit of, and we use a number of other tests to look at total biological activity just to see how things have been stimulated.

1:34:24 And when we looked at the, and I'll walk you through this slide, and this will be my last slide essentially. You know, when we looked at how much biological activity was occurring, we see huge jumps. Whether we're just putting compost material, other organic materials, if we're doing compost extracts, all of those things really jump the soil biological activity. And one of the things that we assume is happening that we see, at least in the plant response, because to me, plant is ultimately the biggest integrated measure of soil quality, right?

1:34:59 When we're talking from an agricultural perspective, soil quality is really basically the ecological function of the soil to support plant growth. So when we look at the plant, we see big responses with the addition of organic matter. And when you look at the soil, so if you look at this graph, this is not yield, this is CO2 emission from the soil, which is a measure of total biological activity. When we look at the perennial peanut, we did under the perennial peanut and under weed mat instead of perennial peanut and bare soil. And the perennial peanut was like a forest floor.

1:35:35 It was very active, equivalent to levels that they measure on forest floors. The black mulch was way down. We didn't have weeds, but we didn't have much else going on under there, too. So the idea of rhizosphere as being very important, sources of carbohydrates for biology, is something that should be hammered home over and over again. So one point is if you just look at the plants that were fertilized primarily for nutrition with compost and then compost tea was added on top of that, you can see the biology much higher than the synthetically fertilized soils.

1:36:06 So regardless of what we did after we put the organic amendment or the synthetic amendment, the organic soils were higher in total biological activity. And then when we looked at the different types of compost tea, if you look at that far, I might as well use this since I have it. If you look here, this is the control which is just water added in the same quantity that we added the extract, the compost extract. And so this is the baseline soil biological activity. When When we added a complete soluble fertilizer solution, we actually got numerically lower,

1:36:42 statistically lower values when we added a synthetic fertilizer source. And then these are the compost teas that were added here. And this is, again, the soil biological activity relative to the other treatments. And you see essentially the same pattern here, just lower under the synthetic fertilizer. So again, our group works with a lot of soil biologists, Koon-Hui especially, but we focus on kind of crop quality and productivity. So thanks for your patience and turn it over to...

1:37:15 Moderator: And then next up is James Rushing. James.

1:37:22 James Rushing: Hi, everybody. James. James nice to meet you. I'm gonna play devil's advocate I'm gonna be the stick in the mud I'm gonna I'm gonna be that guy today and since I'm supported by several scientists I'm gonna talk about the science behind natural farming a little bit of some truths maybe some myths and what we know as a science as scientists and biologists about natural farming just real quick about myself A bachelor's science at tropical plants and soil sciences at UH Manoa and a master's degree for tropical conservation biology environmental science at UH Hilo.

1:38:04 I'm also the professor, interim professor for sustainable agriculture at UH Hilo. Also a researcher and a hardcore natural farming advocate as much as I possibly can be. So I've been with this group for about five years and my knowledge of sustainable agriculture has evolved with this. And I'll have you guys know I do teach a lot of these concepts in the sustainable agriculture courses that I teach at the university. So you guys are actually having students being taught natural farming practices. So I like to incorporate them as much as I can. It's hard to see that in the title on the top.

1:38:39 But I did just recently finish a thesis, a three and a half year study on IMO-4 as a soil inoculant. And actually we'll be presenting that information at the natural farming meeting on Tuesday next week. So if anybody wants to come out and check that out, it's definitely useful information. And I have several individuals that were on my committee are here today, Dr. Wang and Theodore Radovich. So if you're interested in really a detailed look at IMO-4 from a scientific perspective, I invite you to come out and take a look at that.

1:39:14 But I just want to briefly talk about as a scientist what we know as scientists and what we know are the benefits of natural farming. Certainly as Ted has just explained and as a lot of us know that increased biodiversity in the soil is definitely beneficial as compared to not having any sort of biological entities in the soil right. Soil organic matter and biodiversity certainly creates a balanced system, and this is important in biology. Creating a system where not one microorganism is stronger than another, and you have plenty of nutrient resources

1:39:54 and organic material to break down, competition is reduced, and you have more of a system that is similar to a typical natural forest system. And then utilizing adapted microorganisms. There is some science behind that. Some studies have showed that microorganisms from the immediate environment will behave differently or better, even in conventional or organic environments. So really just utilizing indigenous microorganisms is definitely a benefit to sustainable agriculture. Environmental, you know, natural farming will certainly reduce fuel consumption, fossil fuel consumption,

1:40:33 whether it be in the delivery of materials or shipping or production. So definitely increase sustainability on that end. reduced pollution. We're talking about nutrient pollution specifically. So we're talking about as compared to conventional and some organic fertilizers, natural farming amendments having a much lower concentration of certain nutrients and utilizing the enzymatic activity of microorganisms to break down organic material and have these nutrients trickle in at a very, very slow pace and small concentrations. And that's more what plants are used to in nature, right?

1:41:09 And then also reusing waste and byproducts. Yeah, waste management is a major part of natural farming that I'm involved in. I love to try to make new fertilizers using the methods that are done in natural farming. And then taking byproducts, things that are considered waste, and then utilizing them back into the field, certainly is an environmental benefit. And then of course improved soil dynamics. Just the fact of adding soil organic matter is going to increase your soil dynamics, aggregation, pH is going to settle out, you're going to have a little bit better water retention.

1:41:47 So these are just definitely some benefits that you're going to find in Korean natural farming, or natural farming in general. These are some possible, say, possible negative effects that could be incorporated into natural farming. Yeah, I'm in stick in the mud, I've got to play devil's advocate. There are some certain things out there that I want you to consider from a scientific perspective when you're looking at natural farming. There are several pathogens that will survive fermentation and thermophilic processes. Know that that is possible.

1:42:18 We do not know if natural farming techniques would get rid of those. We don't have any science out there that actually shows that. And again, another call to arms to anybody doing research that this is something that we definitely want to look into is the transmission of pathogens with natural farming. Also, pathogens and pests in material transfer. As a consultant and natural farming advocate, you know, I tell these people to utilize these methods. and then I have issues with the people that I work with actually having disease arrive on the farm

1:42:54 only just after natural farming amendments were applied. So there's certainly something to be said there. I have several cases where this is an issue, and I call, again, anybody who's interested in this, maybe contacting the university, saying I have a plot of land, or maybe we could figure out a way to do a study and find funding. So if that's something you're concerned about, as well as pests, fire ants, big deal with a lot of natural farmers transferring IMOs and transferring plant materials. So definitely a negative aspect to the whole scheme, right?

1:43:27 Mineralogical problems that can arise, well, by adding high nitrogen, you know, soluble sugar concoctions, you certainly going to disturb the carbon to nitrogen ratio that Ted had just brought up. And that is certainly going to affect the mineralization within your soil. So without an understanding of how much nitrogen or carbon you're adding into your environment with your amendments can be very detrimental, at least to the use of the fertilizers themselves. So understanding how much carbon, how much nitrogen is definitely a big deal. Also, there's a lot of soil scientists

1:44:10 that are talking about natural farming having an issue with soil mining. And this is where microorganisms break down mineral sources and organic matter sources. And then those minerals are not actually replaced back into the environment because some protocols in natural farming might dictate you don't add fertilizers or something like that. So it's really just a matter of having a standardized protocol. And I think with that standardized protocol, fertilization is incorporated into it. You won't have such a big problem. And then also the rapid mineralization.

1:44:46 If you are to put out a soil inoculant and it succeeds in actually surviving that inoculation process, add organic matter out there, those microorganisms are going to start breaking that material down very, very quickly. And then if it's breaking down a large amount of it very rapidly, a lot of that material gets leached away and lost. So there needs to be studies on the mineralization of the organic matter and if inoculation speeds up, slows down, could be detrimental or that kind of thing. I'm just, again, calling for research in these fields.

1:45:24 These are myths about natural farming that a couple folks have taken classes with me, have seen this before. And it's really just myths from a scientific perspective. Number one, we know that it works. We don't have any studies out there that generally show that it works in multiple locations, using the same protocols and all that stuff. So there's just a whole bunch of information that we need still to find out, even if the system works, where it works, or in what environments. If it works, we know why it works. No, we don't really know because microbiologists are a pioneering type of field.

1:46:05 We know about 1% of the microorganisms available in the soil, which is a great improvement from 30 years ago being 0.001%. We did a great job once PCR and genetics started getting involved, but we just have absolutely no idea what's going on in there from a scientific perspective, to be honest. Yeah, we have these theories, and we prove facts here and there, but it's just few and far between. It works all the time. I definitely have proven in certain situations that it doesn't work on one guy's plot and two miles down the road and it works wonderfully.

1:46:38 So there's no studies out there that it's successful in multiple locations. There are top tier peer reviewed scientific articles that show significant data. Not one. Not one. There are reports out there but they are not top tier. We're talking like the scholarly level journals. Now the asterisk on there because I hope to have one up here really soon based upon my research project. And that's pretty up to date. I mean, I think there might be one or two coming out pretty soon with thesis experiments that came out of New England and a couple other individuals that things are coming out.

1:47:13 But right now that's the way it exists. Only specific materials need to be used. Depends on what school you come from. Are you part of the school that you have to use specific elements and you have to purchase them and mill run or whatever versus something else? I've done preliminary experiments and show that there are materials on this island that are available that actually work better than some of the prescribed carbohydrate sources like breadfruit flour works really well. And it's a sustainable source and it's local. Again.

1:47:48 It's still considered natural farming if the materials come off a boat. At that point, you're organic farming, as far as I'm concerned, and most scientists are concerned, at least the natural farmers. If you're buying sugar that came off a boat, if you're buying all these things, it really, I would suggest, is trying to steer your system to what is available to you and what you can utilize. The protocols that are written in a lot of these books, folks will tell you you have to stick to them and some folks will tell you try something that works for you so that's my recommendation

1:48:18 IMO-4 is the answer for everything? definitely not seems to be that's a regular suggestion in a lot of the classes I have some people have found success with it for sure I don't need fertilizers in my natural farming system again I talk about that soil mining not replacing those macronutrients but more importantly the micronutrients, the boron, chlorine, all these other elements that are really stripped away by microorganism decomposition. Unless you're replacing them back with organic matter or any other amendment, you're not going to be as successful.

1:48:55 And then natural farming is the answer to all my problems. No, find out what works for you. Figure out your system. What can you incorporate from here over there? Maybe at some point along the way, you can get to the point where you're 100% natural farming and you're doing all that. But don't try to come in and be successful right off the bat. It seems that most of the successful people kind of trickle in this, bring in that part, figure out that this doesn't work for them, and they replace it with this method. Well, so consider this. This is my call to arms.

1:49:23 Really just be scientific in your understanding of natural farming. Don't fall for the proof is in the pudding. You know, I did this experiment. I had wonderful growth. Well, that's mainly because many factors can contribute to plant production and plant health and disease suppression. That being said, I don't mean to be a negative Nancy. We have a lot of potential to show that things are working, things are beneficial, that we can spread this information out to the world and have people access good, legitimate data. But what we need is science and researchers and CTAHR

1:49:55 and all these organizations and farmers like yourself going to these organizations and saying, I have an interest in the result of this study. I have land. Let's see if we can put something together, you know? finding funding and seeing if we could put together a publication which will benefit everybody in the future and allow those individuals to make the right decisions for them. Question?

1:50:20 Audience: Where was this done? Was it done on lava or was it done on Hakalau?

1:50:25 James Rushing: Three farms in Hakalau.

1:50:29 Audience: So I think it was different for lava.

1:50:32 James Rushing: Oh, I would say certainly. When you're talking about soil differences, definitely. Right, that's why I call for this type of experiments, all those experiments being done multiple locations all over the island, on different islands, in the mainland, in Europe, in Africa. We need to spread out this research and bring it back home.

1:50:53 Audience: What kind of pathogens were present in the ferments?

1:51:00 James Rushing: Oh, I haven't found any, but there are pathogens that have been known to exist in past fermentation in thermophilic composting. I don't know any off the top of my head, but I can email you a list to see if I can...

1:51:12 Audience: Microscope identification of microorganisms is very difficult.

1:51:19 James Rushing: Oh, certainly, certainly. But I'm done, so... Yeah, that was it. Yeah. And Josiah next. Okay, you're as loud as me, we're good. I'm going to turn it off.

1:51:45 Josiah Hunt: I'll just talk loud. Y'all can hear me, right? So, I'm going to go through this quick and then I'm going to run. I've got to go pick up my kids. So, if you've got a couple of questions, we'll just make them super quick and I'll be out of here. But I've got to run, I've got to just do this. So, okay, cool. So Pacific Biochar, I started, I just kind of started this biochar pathway a long time ago. First company I started, truly dedicated to biochar was Hawaii Biochar.

1:52:30 I'm now doing work in California and Oregon and Washington and also in Southeast Asia and Australia now, so it's grown to become Pacific Biochar. So if you want to find out more information, because I left too quick, you can go to the biochar website or send me a link to that or something like that. So what is biochar? This is really important and this has been evolving. And I've been working on this and so I have like this three paragraph definition and I just boiled it down to the most essential, which is biochar is a term. It's a term, not a material. Biochar is a term.

1:53:10 the term refers to biomass charcoal when used or found in soil. That's it. So if you go into the store and got a bag of charcoal and you went and used it in your barbecue, that's charcoal. And if you took that bag of charcoal and went and crushed it up and used it in your soil, at some point along that line it became biochar. Just because it's a term. And that's how we use that term. So you'll hear me relate things to that. Especially like right here. So this isn't, Iowa isn't the first place people usually think of when the

1:53:46 term biochar comes up. But I found this really interesting that Iowa's famously fertile soils are now estimated that that 30 to 50 percent of the organic matter in that area is pyrogenic organic material. So fires race through the rangeland and create ash and charcoal and that adds up over time. And one of the scientists who did the work on this, Bruno Glaser, some of the original work on this, I asked him, oh, naturally produced from grassland, he said, well, humans lived here for 10,000 years, so I'm not sure if we can call them naturally produced.

1:54:34 And one of the reasons this has been not really in the front and center for so long is because typically the way you measure carbon or organic material in soil does not differentiate between pyrogenic-derived, fire-derived carbon and wood chip decay. Because it often involves a burn or other tests that don't really pull that out. You have to run through a magnetic, near resonance magnetic, electromagnetic, I should remember the name of, but I don't. All right, so anyways, this would be kind of where the biochar part fits in. And so this is your standard view of what's in our soil.

1:55:21 And we just had to come up with the word biochar because it became so obvious that, wow, there's a bunch of burnt stuff in our soil too. It doesn't decay very fast. It does decay eventually, but it decays so gosh darn slow that only a little bit is needed to accumulate in soil. And so it does. And so one way to call it is pyrogenic organic matter, or let's call it biochar. This is in the Amazon. This is a terra prepa soil. This is a terra preta soil. if they've heard of biochar, when they hear that. Because these soils are just such a very, very stark, very, very stark and clear picture

1:56:05 of the value of charcoal in soil. Because typically in a tropical environment with 200 inches of rain, this is what your soil profile is gonna look like. Organic matter is being created and it's being decomposed and washed away and nutrients are washing away. And the heavy rain just kind of pushes everything away. These soils, this is actually just a few hundred feet away. These soils were made by man. These soils were made by the people that lived there. And they have lots and lots of charcoal in them. And the charcoal helped allow the minerals and the organic matter to stick. All right?

1:56:44 So that's not just black because they put a bunch of charcoal in it. the amount of organic matter that's not burnt is much much higher in this soil than it is in this soil. So it actually gave something for everything else to stick to. And this was so mind-blowing that humans created these incredibly fertile soils that again sparked this whole thing about biochar. And just to kind of show, they scraped the forest off and planted some corn and planted some corn. That's fertility that lasted for 500 years after the culture died or whatever happened.

1:57:21 Germs and disease and stuff like that tend to kill off most of the Amazonian tribes. So that soil has been basically leached for 500 years and that fertility remained. It was kind of stunning. So that kind of spawned this whole idea of biochar. And I'm taking a long time. Forgive me here. So that's what it looks like up close. That's a spoon. That's what I view as biochar. That's a wonderful material that I made on the mainland. Here's that same stuff inoculated. It's covered in mostly actinomycetes and other things.

1:57:52 I send it through a biological process to make it more like the biochar is like the surface of the moon when it's specially created. So I culture it a little bit so that it's more readily accepted by soil and plants. You get better results that way. Here's biochar very, very, very, very up close. Alright, so you can see, this picture does a good job of showing you that the plant, this is bamboo, the plant has vascular tissue. It carries food and water throughout its body from the soil up through the leaves. It's carrying things all through its body. It has a structure.

1:58:29 When it's burnt, like in that first picture where you showed it was glowing, when it has gone through being a piece of wood to a glowing ember and then cooled without becoming ash. That structure is essentially frozen in time. All the carbon connections that were cellulose and hemicellulose and lignins, those bonds, the larger bonds that created the structural elements of that plant's body get frozen in time. You can find pieces of biochar that are hundreds and hundreds of years old and you can be able to identify the species of wood or the species of plant that it was created from.

1:59:10 And they do this in archaeological digs, in fire stations and stuff like that. That's how they find out information about really old tribes and stuff. So that is really important. And all that gunky stuff around that, that's bacteria. This is a composting study with bacillus. And they found that biochar dramatically increased the rate of biological activity. So it gives you a size reference. So that's the bacillus bacteria in the biochar there. And then here's a mycorrhizal, here's the spore. This is a glomus spore. And then here's all the hyphae.

1:59:44 You can see the size, it's just beautiful, it's just perfect. All that, the fungal hyphae, that's the fuzzy stuff that you would see, like the cotton-y or kind of thread-looking stuff. It's just plugging right into the biochar. I feel like this picture is important. So then here's stepping back a little bit more. This is in a compost pile in my yard. This is a piece of charcoal I pulled out of the ground. I had to literally pull this out. This was a piece of charcoal that was in a composting experiment I was doing. So it was loaded with nutrients.

2:00:20 And then I went a year or two later and pulled it out from underneath a long gone tree. And you can see here that it's just covered in roots. And there's roots going in and out and in and out. So you can actually see a root coming out of the biochar, again showing that this is from a living tissue that has tubes and tunnels. So with biochar, it's not like a chunk of gravel where the surface area is determined by the exterior surface. It has an interior surface. For something this large, I mean that's like a planet if you were bacteria.

2:01:00 size of that you can have you could probably have a billion bacteria living on that. So again showing showing how this material might be very interesting when thinking about soil biology. So this this is a study from the Amazon basin that I think really kind of captures again why in Korean natural farming they were suggesting using charcoal and why a lot of Korean natural farming recipes in the making of IMO and plant propagation and soil treatments that talk about charcoal in the system it's very biologically intensive. This is really big. So here they did a study bacterial

2:01:50 community composition, right, so how much in the composition of. In Brazilian anthrosols, anthrosol is basically a human-made soil that's referring to terra preta soils and the adjacent soils meaning the soils right next to them. using culturing and molecular identification. So here it is. Here's the community in the anthrosol with a bunch of charcoal and here's the community without. I think that really just kind of captures it there. That's kind of like healthy, healthier. That's the healthier soil. Just looking at the microbial diversity on that and abundance. Well I guess isn't as an

2:02:37 abundance, this diversity. Again so I said look that bag of charcoal you can go buy a bag of charcoal and then you put this all of a sudden biochar. Typically when you are creating charcoal you're selling it for its weight and its thermal value and you'll typically be in this zone. Whereas biochar production you're selling, you're trying to get a product that has very high absorption and you're oftentimes gaining that energy. So you're typically going to be in this zone. It's just, it's kind of important that barbecue charcoal can work, but it's not necessarily ideal. So

2:03:15 I've probably got, how am I doing on time? All right, I'll make it really quick. The next few slides I'm going to go through some of the aspects of biochar and some of the research articles that have been published. There's now about 3,500, 3,500 peer-reviewed published research articles regarding biochar. Not only biochar by name, often they're using the name charcoal or pyrogenic organic matter, but basically there's about 5,000, I'm sorry, 3,500 research articles. So I just, these are some of my favorites. All right, so here we go, biochar and water. Biochar application increased growth,

2:03:56 drought tolerance and leaf nitrogen and water use efficiency of quinoa despite larger plant leaf areas so they were bigger and even though they're bigger they still use water better instead of being bigger and just sucking them up and just running out and this is a really recent one from Italy they did a four years field trial in a very well respected vineyard in Italy and they found as much as 66% increase in yield without negatively affecting the quality of grapes. What was really interesting is that over the four years the greatest difference in yield

2:04:34 was inversely correlated to weather, meaning the worse the weather was, the greater difference in yield. So on the dry year basically the biochar test plot was really pronounced above the other. Biochar nutrient management. Basically biochar helps, okay I've got the two minute flag here, biochar helps to hold nutrients in the soil. It holds nutrients against leaching and reduces volatilization as well. It's extremely high surface area. In the palm of my hand, a gram of biochar that could fit in the palm of my hand, if you were to fold that out to be two-dimensional,

2:05:16 completely two dimensional, one plane, it has the surface area of this entire room. If it's a good biochar, it has a surface area of a basketball court. In the palm of your hand, unfold it completely flat, and you cover a basketball court. So extremely high surface area, and a surface that is adsorptive, meaning that ions with positive the negative charges and minerals and can bond the surface and this becomes more pronounced as humic acids and fulvic acids bond with that surface as well. It becomes essentially above that. So what we find is biochar treatments

2:05:54 consistently decrease nitrous oxide emissions which is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Consistently decrease nitrous oxide emissions by 14 to 37, to 73 percent from the Alfisol, and Vertisols, two soils there, and by 23 to 52 percent from the Vertisol. The leaching of ammonia, so this is going down the leaching of ammonium was reduced by 55 to 93 percent so they left they lost less nitrogen really kind of important and this is this is another Another one that was just done recently, this one they mixed the biochar with the fertilizer and found great results.

2:06:37 They mixed the biochar with the compost and found great results. Rather than spreading the biochar throughout your entire field to increase your net capture, you know, like basically creating a better filter, they just put it right in the fertilizer and right in the compost and basically we're able to achieve somewhat of a similar thing, which is more of an economic approach. Locally I sell a fertilizer that's taking the fish, meat and bone meal from Oʻahu, blended with biochar and some other minerals. And that's used over on Kona side, mostly in coffee farms. And those guys love it.

2:07:10 For that same reason, we're losing less nitrogen. Here they use biochar in a poultry litter. So you're using it in a high nitrogen composting situation. And in that, they reduced the ammonia concentrations in the emissions were lower by up to 64%. So they reduced ammonia emissions in the poultry litter by 64%. And then the total loss of nitrogen was reduced by 52%, where the biochar was used in the compost, in the high nitrogen poultry litter compost. Okay, biochar, microbes, and fungi. I've kind of gone over that a bit already.

2:07:49 lots of great results and some scientific studies. Biochar and soil contaminants. Specifically for Hawaii this is very important. We have a toxic legacy left over from decades of not knowing and putting lots of bad chemicals in the soil. And so there's arsenic and a lot more stuff than that. So biochar can help that. And basically this is how it works. I'm gonna break it down the first two sentences here biochar is an indiscriminate bank it has an extremely high surface area and it doesn't care who you are you can you can come I'm right here I want it it's an indiscriminate bank for ions and

2:08:33 biochar but the biology in the soil is discriminant plants and soil microbes do choose I mean I don't think they sit there and decide you know I was kind of but they have, you know, for whatever, in whatever mechanisms, they're able to selectively... So what we find is that where biochar is put in the soil, it's not as though the arsenic is pooped gone, but the arsenic that was in the soil is no longer showing up. I guess arsenic's not a good idea, because I don't... because it kind of stays in there, but...

2:09:06 So I'm working on a project in California. California has cadmium, high level of cadmium, of cadmium in a lot of really good soil areas. So right now I'm working with extension agents there. We're doing test plots and reducing cadmium. And there's a bunch of research that always shows effectiveness, and we're just looking at my products and the price points, and if we can make it all work. And what we're finding is that you put the biochar in the soil, you don't reduce the cadmium in the soil, but you reduce the plant uptake of cadmium. Same with all kinds of hydrocarbons and organic compounds

2:09:41 like pesticide and herbicide and certain heavy metals. That's shown well in this. They did a fungal, they did a soft rock phosphate. So a lot of people in organic farming use rock phosphate. Rock phosphate has a lot of fluorine in it, which is kind of problematic. When the phosphorus is freed off, there's this extra fluorine cruising around. Sometimes that reduces the plant's ability to cleave off phosphorus. So anyways, they tried mixing stuff with this rock phosphate, and what they found is that when biochar was mixed with rock phosphate, it gave somewhere for the fluorine to stick to.

2:10:23 First of all, the fungi were able to have a better, they had greater activity in cleaving the phosphorus and the fluorine, and once they did, the fluorine had something to stick to and was no longer causing such a problem, the plants were able to take the phosphorus and go over it. So I think that's kind of a great example of biochar, this great surface area of bank, kind of like other organic matters as well, being able to help kind of buffer the situation when you have nutrient dysfunctions in soils. And I probably ran out of time here, so here it is.

2:11:00 I broke it down to three things to remember, because I probably just shoved way too much at you. So one, biochar is a long-lived organic matter. They've stayed long there, I mean, hundreds to thousands of years. Wood chips last a few years, biochar lasts hundreds to thousands. It is incredibly porous, which makes good housing for microorganisms. Nutrients and water bind to its surface in a way that they can be selectively pulled off by plants and microbes. That's about it. I see a question.

2:11:30 Audience: Is there a particular plant that you partner with that you're just moving in particular mineral or whatever?

2:11:47 Josiah Hunt: The cadmium problem? The problem is the soils that have cadmium are great soils for growing lettuce, and lettuce is a great bioaccumulator of cadmium. But locally here, something that's really good news is that there's been no production since I stopped. There's been no production of biochar since I stopped. No commercial production of biochar since I stopped. And as of like this week, I've got five cubic yards of biochar available every single day at half the price that it would be at the social food store.

2:12:22 Audience: So you're going to revitalize the soils, but I'm going to get to my main question. And you're looking to try to, like, replenish the earth. Is there a particular plant that you drove to remove, or anything, and then, you know, nothing tested against it? Or is it okay?

2:12:36 Josiah Hunt: Well, I mean, the soils that are messed up are just kind of messed up. But Biochar can help kind of at least make it less of a problem. My big dream for Hāmākua is, like, we have very similar situations to the terra preta soils. We have tons and tons and tons of rain. You saw, like, you know, add some charcoal and things, we're too working, we find a lot of it, so I'm imagining, like, yeah, let's do it. Natural farming, biochar, which will come through the hospital. Thanks, guys.

2:13:16 Jana Bogs: Aloha. I'm a nutritionist who turned into a horticulturalist because I came to realize there was a lot of studies that came out that showed how we had lost nutrient density from our foods. As much as 70% of some nutrients in our foods that are very important to our health had been lost over a period of just like 70 years. That might go. So I don't have to strain to get it out there, right? Okay, did everybody hear what I just said? We're okay. Okay. Anyway, so the microbes are very important for making nutrients available to the plants

2:14:03 so that it increases the nutrient value in the plants, the food that we eat. And so we're just focusing kind of on the microbes today. So something bad has happened to our food. So as I was saying, the food nutrient content has dropped greatly over the last 70 years. And actually, it was a problem even before that. It's just that these studies went back and looked at USDA databases, and they compared from back in the 1930s and 1940s up to like the present day, and they saw these huge drops. But even back in like 1930s, people were concerned about the lack of nutrient density.

2:14:46 And a lot of doctors were saying, oh, you know, all my patients are having these nutrient density, or they're having nutrient deficiencies. Yeah. And so anyway, it has just gotten worse over time. So there have been changes in our food system and in our agricultural methods that have caused this. We now have depleted soils. Depleted of what? Minerals, depleted of organic matter, depleted of good microbes. So, and we also have lots of what I call chemical 'cides. So fungicides, herbicides, insecticides. And the GMOs have just made things worse.

2:15:26 Instead of going the other way, they genetically modify something so they can put more chemicals on. And those foods do have less nutrients too. So this is a really interesting chart. And it goes from about 1900 up to the present day. and it shows the drop of food nutrient density, like these different minerals dropping down, and that's come about a lot because of the mechanization of farming and adding chemicals of various types in GMOs with the glyphosate, which ties up nutrients. And then this chart is just an overlay of the first one,

2:16:05 but it shows the people having all these different problems, like cancer and heart disease and things like that, and how that's increased. So decrease the minerals, increase the problems with health. So how do we increase food nutrient content? I do soil analysis for farmers and gardeners, and I do a very extensive analysis with like 18 different minerals on there and the pH, and I'll show you more about that in a little bit. And, of course, the microbes. increasing the beneficial microbes, their diversity, and also the earthworms, making those nutrients available to the plants.

2:16:45 And I do plant tissue testing. So like a leaf tissue test, we can see what's going on with that growing plant and what it needs. And then we can actually do foliar nutrition sprays. And that's very fast acting. Helps those plants with their overall health and increases the nutrient density of the food. And then I go the extra step and I look at the final food and actually look at its nutrient density, compare it to USDA values. And that's like something in my book, my research.

2:17:16 So for my PhD, I actually looked all the way from soil through the plant tissue and into human blood to see the effects all the way. Which is really unusual because most universities just sort of pigeonhole everything. It's sort of like, oh, you look at the soil, oh, you look at the plant tissue, oh, you look at human health and human blood and such. And I said, no, I'm going to look at all the way and see how it affects. Anyway, so the bottom line is that we want to give our plants the correct amounts of everything they need to express their full potentials.

2:17:50 And then hopefully when we eat that food, we can express our full potentials. So we're going to just really kind of focus in on the microbes since that's what Korean really brings about the microbes and so this is what we're going to kind of focus on today here with this talk. But we need lots of different kinds of bacteria and different kinds of fungi. All these tens of thousands of species should be there. And as I said, they make the nutrients available to the plants. They also do suppressing of diseases, and Ted was talking about some of that stuff.

2:18:31 And you've heard also about the structuring of the soil, how they stop erosion. And some of them fix nitrogen from the air. And where do we get them? Compost, vermicompost, compost tea, inoculants of various types, including the IMOs. I know some of this is a little redundant, but it's like maybe I'll sink in really well. Anyway, you can't manage what you don't measure. And so I took Elaine Ingham's course, and I bought the microscope that she recommended, and I do this work also. So I'll look at somebody's soil under the microscope and see, you know,

2:19:08 what sort of levels and activity of bacteria and also the levels of fungi that are there and protozoan nematodes too. Okay, so now this slide is just sort of showing like all these different elements that go into making some good food. And I think a lot of people sort of get pigeonholed in either, oh, it's all about the minerals. No, oh, it's all about the microbes. But I'm saying it's about all of these things, and the minerals are actually needed for the microbes to be healthy. You can kind of think of the microbes as little animals in the soil. So, what do microbes need?

2:19:49 Well, kind of like us, they need air and they need water and they need food and they need housing. So, like Josiah was talking about the housing in the biochar, right? And you know, we're feeding them different things. So some of the things that they need are carbon and nitrogen. And depending on what kind of microbe they are, they like either more or less of the carbon and nitrogen. And we're going to have a slide later that talks about that. And then looking at mineral elements, the calcium magnesium ratio is really important about the hardness of the soil.

2:20:22 If you get too high of magnesium in comparison to calcium, you get very hard soil, a tight soil. And some say that this ratio is the most determining factor as to whether farmers are going to make money or they're not going to make money. So it's hugely important. And what I see, because I've done soil analysis all over the island, a lot of times the magnesium is much higher than it should be in relationship to the calcium. And so we do have hard soils. I can't hardly get my soil probe down into the soil sometimes because it's just so hard. And the sodium also hardens the soil.

2:21:02 And I've seen that, especially if you're down near the ocean where you get those salt breezes that come through. Wow, it can be high in sodium and it's really hard and you also have water absorption issues. So I'm going to skip down to the next slide and then I'm going to come back. I just wanted to talk about this ocean water because I know some people like to use ocean water and it's okay and it's good because it has lots and lots of different elements. But if your plants need the elements that it's supplying because it is really high in

2:21:37 sodium. I mean look at this how much sodium it has compared to something like calcium. And in your soils you're going to need a lot more calcium than sodium. If you need sodium in your soils that's great, you know, but you can also kill your plants by using too much of it. So that you have to be careful about that. And look at the chlorine, very very high chlorine. You do need some chlorine but you can also kill your plants if you put too much on there. Like chlorine typically is very hard on the microbes. It can kill the microbes and that's why

2:22:10 in organic, like certified organic, you can't use things like potassium chloride. It's not allowed and it's hard on the soil. Now we're going to go back to that other slide and we're going to finish up. Phosphorus and this is like a soft rock phosphate and Josiah was talking about this too and it's the fungi really love it. And there are different kinds of soft rock phosphate. Some of them, I like the one that comes from Florida, it's called CalPhos. It seems to be cleaner than some of the ones that come up from like Idaho and Montana, which can have heavy metals. So you don't

2:22:44 want that. And then down here is molybdenum and cobalt. And most people don't soil test for these. They're pretty unusual, but they're actually needed by the microbes. So molybdenum is needed for the nitrogen fixation by bacteria, and cobalt is the central ion in vitamin B12. If you don't have these things in your soil, then you're not going to have the diversity of microbes. They're just not going to be there because they need this, and they can't live without it. So basically you need to think of your microbes as little animals, and they need a large array of minerals.

2:23:23 Okay, so high quality analysis are the key. And there we go. There's lots of things that go into it. And I'm not going to go into each one of these because it's just too much to go into. They gave me 10 minutes. But there's lots of elements and these are all on my soil analysis. And then I did the microbial analysis also and plant tissue analysis as I said. And I interpret them for nutrient density, increasing the nutrient density in the foods. So that's the other thing. There's hardly been any research about increasing nutrient density.

2:23:58 Most of the research is about yield, not about the food nutrient density. But I'm hoping to change that more and more. Anyway, so this is just an example of one of my tests that the soil report, it's two pages because I said it's got lots of things on it. And here is a chart that is going back to this fungi to bacteria ratio. And you can see here that different crops need different ratios of fungi to bacteria to work well. So the trees need a larger amount of fungi compared to bacteria in comparison to things like vegetables. So vegetables and row crops is more like one to one.

2:24:45 Whereas your fruit trees, you need like five parts of fungi to one part of bacteria, or even more, depending on what it is. And the interesting thing about this is look down here at the bottom, weeds, 0.1 to 1, which means there's a lot more bacteria compared to fungi. And what I see in soils when I do all these analyses is I see most of the time we have bacteria but hardly any fungi. no wonder they're having weeds, weeds, weeds. So by shifting that balance, you can change things. Okay, carbon and nitrogen ratios. Bacteria need a different amount than fungi. So the fungi need

2:25:29 more carbon and less of the protein, whereas bacteria need more protein. And this charts and the other charts in my book too. So okay, so if you do things right, you are going to get increased nutrition. You're going to have better flavor because the plant can express all of its flavor compounds and longer shelf life and even changes in human blood glucose response. It's cool. This is one of my farmers. And you're going to increase your quality, decrease pests, increase yield, and increase viability, like economic viability for the farmer.

2:26:06 In summary, managing your microbes, you want to get a microbiological test with the microscope. You want to use comprehensive soil mineral analysis. And then, of course, you're going to amend and fertilize according to the test results. Here's my book, which I did bring some copies today here. And I'm happy to say that it's made number one in a couple of categories on Amazon. Okay, well, good. Oh.

2:26:33 Audience: Yeah, I recently heard about someone using lots of dolomite lime in their soil. and they actually put so much in their soil that they said they had to sell it more.

2:26:45 Jana Bogs: Wow.

2:26:46 Audience: Because they would never recover from it. It was all like that. And I guess maybe that has to do with the magnesium.

2:26:54 Jana Bogs: Yes, that is true. And that's one thing that people tend to buy products that aren't good for their soil because they didn't test and they didn't have someone tell them. And sometimes I'll send somebody their test results and it says to use gypsum, which is calcium sulfate, and or lime, which is calcium carbonate, not dolomite, which has a lot of magnesium. It's like 20% calcium and 10% magnesium, which is a huge imbalance according to what you really need in the soil. And if you've already got too much magnesium and you put that on, you're going to have a real problem. And it happens. Mm-hmm?

2:27:33 Audience: What about Epsom salt?

2:27:35 Jana Bogs: Epsom salt, that is high magnesium, it's magnesium sulfate. So, you know, I mean some soils need magnesium, but what I see around here, most of them, it's more calcium they need, not magnesium.

2:27:54 Audience: I'm just curious if you know the difference between the seawater and the preventive seawater regarding the minerals in it?

2:28:02 Jana Bogs: I don't have data on that. That's interesting. Yeah, it would be interesting to see what's what. So, I mean, if it's basically seawater and they've just added microbes, I'm not sure.

2:28:17 Audience: Yeah, I don't know. Yeah.

2:28:27 Jana Bogs: Well, the thing is, I mean, you're still getting some salt water there, right? So, and often I actually recommend that on my tests is use ocean water, but you're going to have to dilute it a lot. And, you know, it's whether you need it in your soil or not. That's the key. That's why we test. So we know exactly what to put on and balance our soil. And it's also balanced for the crop that you're growing. It's going to be different if you're growing fruit trees versus whether you want to pasture, for instance. Okay. Okay.