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NC Farm Center Receives Award to Test Biochar
Producing Biochar from a mobile Pyrolysis machine can help North Carolina’s farmers increase crop productivity, particularly in areas with sandy soils. A new grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will help launch a Biochar test project right in their backyard.
The NRCS has awarded the NC Farm Center for Innovation & Sustainability a $538,317 three-year grant to demonstrate the benefits of using a mobile Pyrolysis unit, which produces Biochar, on the farm. Matching funds provided by private donors have brought the total budget for the project to roughly $1.24 million.
Biochar is a charcoal-like, natural soil amendment that is produced by heating agricultural and forestry wastes without oxygen in a process called Pyrolysis. The project will evaluate the benefits of using Pyrolysis and applying Biochar on North Carolina’s farmlands and forests. Biochar is expected to increase crop density and productivity and is especially suited to improving the quality of North Carolina’s marginal, sandy soils. Adding Biochar to soils and thereby increasing their ability to sustain crops will provide farmers with more crop options and perhaps encourage them to venture into alternative, locally driven food crop markets.
The award was part of an $18 million package of funding for conservation innovation grants (CIG) announced July 13, 2009, by Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack. The CIG funds support farmers, non-profits, companies, universities and others who are working to develop new, innovative and promising practical approaches to agriculture. The grant will enable the NC Farm Center to emerge as an early innovator and distributor of knowledge in the use of Biochar and Pyrolysis in the United States. Ultimately, the NC Farm Center will work with other farmers to encourage them to adopt sustainable techniques for using Biochar.
The Center will evaluate the effects of using Biochar on typical North Carolina crops, such as corn, vegetables, soybeans and Bermuda grass on its 6,000-acre learning farm in southeastern North Carolina. The Center will also assess the value of Biochar-enhanced soils to forest crops. Biochar will be applied to recent afforested areas to test its effects on tree growth as part of an extensive wetlands restoration project involving 1.2 million plantings of diversified native tree species.
Biochar’s capacity to enhance crop yields and improve moisture retention of soil is especially important to validate during this trial project. The results of such experimentation will be especially valuable in eastern North Carolina’s coastal region, where the demise of the state’s original cash crop, tobacco, has forced farmers to search for alternative crops that are suited to small and medium-sized farms. A second, neighboring farm owned and operated by professional agronomist W.Scott Weathington will also participate in the project by testing Biochar complemented with several other organic soil additive materials, including turkey litter, hog wastes and worm casing compost.
The use of Biochar for agriculture is not new. It was used over 500 years ago by Amerindian cultures in the South American Amazon River Basin. Interest in Biochar is growing, and tests of the material at a limited number of locations and scientific laboratories around the globe are showing that Biochar has the ability to increase crop productivity. The NC Farm Center project is unique in bringing a newly designed mobile Pyrolysis unit to its farm to produce Biochar from its own woody waste feedstocks.
The results of the NC Farm Center project are important to affirm the varied benefits and improvements to soil fertility management and sustainable forest management possible with Biochar. By investing in the first available mobile Pyrolysis machine, manufactured by BioSystems LLC and Bioengineering Corp., the Center hopes to demonstrate an innovative technology and prove that Biochar can help farmers and forest landowners. The NC Farm Center hopes the findings will help stimulate a rural green economy in North Carolina.
The non-profit NC Farm Center for Innovation & Sustainability was established in 2008 for the purpose of working with sustainable technologies that are developed as practical demonstration projects on a 6,000-acre farm in southeastern NC. The goal is to combine innovation and business with environmental sustainability in new ways for producing marketable food crops and forestry for renewable energy. The Center is composed of a 17-member advisory Board ranging in expertise from agriculture, finances, education, business and conservation.
The strength of the Center comes from its own experience. Once a large-scale commercial farm, today we implement programs and projects involving food security, community farming, water and wetlands conservation management, sustainable forestry and applications of biomass and biochar, among others to provide examples of green economies suited to North Carolina.
Richard Perritt, Executive Director. For more Information: Rperritt@ncfarmcenter.org / (910) 630-6232.
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