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Using our method farmers are turning their crop waste into biochar.

Sequestering the biochar does more than bring down our CO2 levels, which scientists say is the most impactful solution to reversing climate change. The biochar enriches their soil, improves water retention, and crops grow bigger, healthier, and more profitable.

So far we have trained over 10,000 smallholder farmers how to make and use biochar. We only have 530 million smallholder farmers more to go!

We have launched our Patreon page for 2 purposes.

1. To raise money to continue and expand our training program. We are working with smallholder farmers in Thailand, Malawi, Kenya. Nigeria, Republic of Condo, Ghana, Tanzania. Our trainers go to rural farming communities to train farmers. The cost of training one farmer is $10.
2. To raise awareness of the benefits of biochar in our efforts to tackle climate change. To have the biggest, longest lasting impact we need to eliminate open field burning of crop waste globally, and replace it with the environmentally friendly method of charing crop waste.

We believe people are concerned about the growing impact climate change is having, but feel helpless to do anything to change it.

We also believe that given a chance people, like you, would be willing to help if they knew how.

By joining our Patreon community and committing to $10 a month will help spread biochar training and awareness. You can be part of the collective solution. The question you need to ask yourself is if saving our environment with a climate action that works is worth $10 a month?

Patreon is usually used to support individual artists. Why not use it to support the training of individual farmers? We are a nonprofit organization, all membership fees go directly to train farmers.

Join today!

The post Alternative to Open Field Burning appeared first on Warm Heart World.

What is Biochar?

Biochar is a super charcoal made by heating any biomass – for example, corncob, husk or stalk, potato or soy hay, rice or wheat straw – without oxygen. All of the cellulose, lignin and other, non-carbon materials gasify and are burned away. What remains is pure carbon – 40% of the carbon originally contained in the biomass.

Why is it so valuable?

Climate change is threatening food security around the world. When farmers use Biochar as a soil amendment they will benefit from:

• Bigger yields   • Healthier soil   • Lower acidity   • Better water retention 
• Stronger plants   • Richer soil life   • Less contamination   • Higher fertility 
 • Promotes seed germination 

​Biochar seems to have no end of uses that derive from a handful of key characteristics.

Tiny holes, huge surface area – retaining water for a dry day

If you look at biochar under an electron microscope, you see an extraordinary moonscape of holes upon holes. What’s this mean? Biochar is an amazing sponge that will hold (absorb) huge amounts of water. All those little holes also provide very convenient condos for soil microbes; we’ll revisit this below.

pH of 8 – unlocking even poor soil’s nutrients

Plants like soil that has a nice, neutral pH of say 6.5 to 7, but most soils in the developing world are acid to very acid – 4 to 5.5. In soils this acidic, most plants cannot take up nutrients, even if they are present in the soil. Stick some biochar in this soil, however, and you can push the pH as much as a whole point higher. As the pH rises, more and more nutrients become available to crops.

Electrically charged surface – very attractive to chemicals

Biochar is attractive to chemicals of all types. Stick a bit of pure carbon biochar in the soil and six months later it is covered with scales of calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, and sulphur. It’s become a little mineral ball. Sprinkle fertilizer on the soil and instead of seeing 50% of it leach away with the rain, that fertilizer, too, will glom onto the biochar, providing long-lasting, slow-release nutrition. Stick biochar in a heavy metal contaminated field and soon the cadmium, lead or mercury are chemically bound to it (adsorbed) where plants can no longer take them up and water can no longer wash them away.

Bug friendly – encouraging soil life

Plants can’t eat their elements raw. No matter how much they need nitrogen, they can’t just suck it up; they need microbes to digest it first and pee it out as nitrates or nitrites. If you look at the root systems of plants, you find all sorts of similar, collaborative relationships. To put it differently, if you don’t see such relationships, chances are, you can’t grow anything. 

How do you make Biochar?

Biochar production is a simple process that anyone can do. Warm Heart has designed cheap and easy methods for converting biomass waste into biochar. The simplest and cheapest method is to dig a hole in the ground. You can also build a cheap biochar oven using an old oil drum, or build a trough.

Whichever method is used, the process is the same, biomass is burned with a lack of oxygen, turning the biomass in biochar, smoke free.

Benefits of making Biochar

If you live in the developed world, field fires are a thing of the past. If you live in the developing world, smoke from agricultural field fires can obscure the sun for days.

Field fires are often smoky, slow smolders burning the residue of crops containing fertilizers fortified with nitrogen and sulphur. These generate large quantities of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as methane and the NOxs (nitrous oxides) that are many times more warming than CO2. (Methane has a global warming potential (GWP) of 25, NOx 298!)

They also produce large quantities of smog precursors such as ammonia and the SOx (sulphur oxides) that react with sunlight to form smog. Finally, that smoke that blocks the sun is PM2.5 – particulate matter so small that it passes through the walls of the lungs into the bloodstream to wreak havoc throughout the body.

Crop waste eliminated through the process of making biochar produces no smoke.

Every year, farmers in the developing world burn more than 10 billion tonnes of crop wastes in their fields. This releases 16.6 billion tonnes of CO₂, 11.2 billion tonnes of CO₂e, 1.1 billion tonnes of smog precursors and 65.7 million tonnes of PM2.5 into the atmosphere. The combined annual CO₂ and CO₂e emissions from crop waste burning are equivalent to the annual emissions of 714 coal fired power plants.

The alternative – converting the waste into biochar instead of burning it removes three tons CO2 from the atmosphere for every ton produced; when added to fields as a soil amendment, that carbon is permanently sequestered.

The long term benefits of making biochar is a huge reduction of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Solution for a healthier planet

Biochar production is not limited to just replacing agricultural field burning in the developing world, anywhere there is a need to remove biomass there is an opportunity to make biochar.

Globally we all need recognize it as a powerful solution to reducing global warming. Even your hometown can participate and reap the benefits of biochar, learn more about how your town can help save the world!

The many uses of Biochar

While it may be invaluable for farmers, it has many other practical uses too. The absorption qualities of biochar make it a perfect solution for odor control, useful for eliminating unwanted odors: in cars, homes, compost piles, pet odors, closets, bathrooms, even in stinky old sneakers!

The powerful moisture adsorption quality makes it extremely helpful in cutting down mildew in damp areas.

Household plants? Biochar potting soil will boost growth and give you healthy plants.

Look for ways to enrich your life with biochar, and help build a market to encourage widespread manufacturing of this simple, yet amazing natural product. It could help save the world!

The post What is Biochar? appeared first on Warm Heart World.

There is no simple solution to the problem.

Getting to a cooler climate, cleaner air and rural development one step at a time

For the past several years, Warm Heart Environmental Program has been developing a biochar system that farmers can use to convert their crop waste into something valuable instead of burning it.

Addressing the needs of the world’s poorest 2.54 billion people – all very small farmers – Warm Heart has taken on the two challenges that have led big development and environment agencies to dismiss biochar infeasible. First, Warm Heart has worked with poor farming villages to develop distributed production systems to demonstrate that they can produce huge quantities of biochar. Second, Warm Heart has worked with farmers to field-test biochar to demonstrate that they will switch to biochar when its economic superiority to alternatives is proven.

Program engineers have designed biochar ovens that are efficient, easy and cheap to build and that individual farm families can use in their own fields to produce biochar for their own use or sale. The widespread distribution of this very low-cost technology could have far-reaching benefits for both the farmers and the environment.

Through a grant from the US Consulate, Warm Heart has trained farmers how to convert from open field burning to making biochar. Warm Heart has also tested biochar-based fertilizers in farmers’ fields to prove to them that it is superior to the synthetic fertilizers they currently buy. Warm Heart now has the hard data and the farmer testimonials to show the world that converting to biochar makes real world economic sense. But to have a true impact, the Biochar Method needs to go viral.

Overcoming Grassroots Obstacles to Solve a Global Problem

Field burning is a global problem that has global consequences; its solution lies at the local level where Warm Heart is working.

Farmers across the world burn more than 330,000 gigatons of field wastes every year. The smoke they create makes up 25 percent of the world’s total of “black carbon”, the second-largest global warming source after CO2.

Making biochar from just 25 percent of developing world field waste will annually eliminate 82,500 metric tons of black carbon and its warming effects.

These numbers are daunting, but they are simply the sum of the actions of billions of very poor, very small farmers. The first challenge, therefore, is how to make it more profitable for them to make biochar than to burn. Warm Heart has proved that this is possible.

Billions of very small farmers in the developing world have real incentives to make biochar – but they do not know it. It rests with the big international organizations, development NGOs and official aid agencies to spread the word. Widespread adoption of the Biochar Method will dramatically improve the lives of the rural poor and actually slow climate change.

The possibility that farmers might embrace biochar leads to the second big problem. What do we do with all of the biochar they do not use in their fields?

Creating a market

Currently there is no bulk biochar market. This needs to change. Biochar is great stuff, but so far little energy and less money has been invested in research outside of the narrow applications of biochar in developed world agriculture (where it seems not to be economically viable). No serious money has been invested in developing world or non-agricultural market research.

Unlike the developed world, the developing world offers a huge potential agricultural market for biochar. Raw biochar can be converted into a natural super fertilizer that reduces the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides (which leach into water supplies and contaminate the food chain), biochar brings life back to dead soils, which in turn improves crop quality and increases production. Biochar also retains huge amounts of water, making it a great, low-cost climate risk mitigation tool for the poor. And biochar is an excellent animal feed additive that improves animal health and weight gain.

In the developed world, biochar has a wide variety of potential, profitable, applications. It can be used as a decontaminant and filtration media, concrete additive, desiccant, and replacement for such industrial materials as carbon black. Experimentation shows that it can be used in grid-sized super-capacitors, to improve food storage and to replace microbeads in many applications.

The bottom line is clear: it is not only possible to make biochar cost-effectively; there is also ample potential demand for biochar pending only imagination and market research.

Mae Chaem – A first feasibility study

Located in Chiang Mai Province, Mae Chaem is a small farming community that grows tens of thousands of tons of corn. A large portion of the smoke pollution that hits Chiang Mai every year comes from the burning of Mae Chaem’s corn waste.

In conjunction with a grant from the Canadian Embassy, Warm Heart is managing a program in Mae Chaem working with a group of farmers to test the feasibility of switching from open field burning to a biochar system.

When first approached with the project, the farmers objected that field burning was too difficult to address because the fields are so large. They argued that the project should start with the massive piles of corn cob waste that accumulates where corn from the fields is de-kernelled. In Mae Na Chon, the sub-district where the Warm Heart team started, de-kernelling produces almost 10,000 tons of cob and husk waste annually. The farmers felt that this would be sufficiently challenging.

Warm Heart provided the materials and the farmers made 250 barrel biochar ovens. Few people were available to make biochar until the end of December because every extended family group was out picking. As the picking season peaked, farmers flocked to the barrels. By the end of January, farmers at a single site were making as much as 15 tons of biochar (750 barrels of biochar) per day. The sight was amazing to behold – but the pile of cob never diminished.

Success – on a small scale

While the training and processing has been successful, it is such a small fraction of the open field burning of crop waste that fills our skies with the dreaded smoke and haze every year.

One thing has become clear – to clear as much air as we aspire to, we need an industrial size solution. But, boy, have we proved that the promise is there!

Change is always difficult. As an incentive to participate in our program, we are “buying the smoke” from the farmers.

Lessons Learned

Mae Chaem taught Warm Heart three things.. First, it proved beyond a doubt that small farmers are very aware of the health consequences of smoke and are ready to try new methods to reduce smoke if they make financial sense. Second, it proved that even the use of very small-scale technology can quickly produce far more biochar than farmers can use, and that it is therefore essential to have an easily accessed external market for surplus. Third, it proved that while the family-sized machine approach will be accepted and is appropriate in a countryside of dispersed, small farms, even a very large number together cannot cope with industrial-scale waste production of the sort found in Mae Chaem, which produces 95,000 tons of corn waste annually.

The Mae Chaem pilot project has taught the Warm Heart Biochar Team how to differentiate among locations and to select the correct technical solution for each. Where the bulk of the developing world crop waste smoke problem originates from the fields of billions of widely dispersed small farmers, very low-cost, low-tech machines distributed to individual families makes financial and organizational sense. Where the characteristics of the crop result in concentrations of large amounts of waste in central locations, larger equipment is necessary. Where the amounts of waste are truly immense (as in Mae Chaem or the Punjab), a switch to an entirely different technology, biomass gasifier power plants, is required.

In March 2017, Warm Heart hopes to begin a collaboration with Chiang Mai University to test a truck mounted biochar system capable of producing 1 ton of char an hour. Warm Heart is already working with local officials to form a sub-district cooperative to build a 1 MW biomass gasifier power plant that will convert 17,000 tons of corn waste to biochar annually.

The post Converting Smoke To Biochar appeared first on Warm Heart World.