Biochar as livestock feed supplement

I discovered today that feeding biochar to livestock is apparently a widespread practice!!
Not just as a treatment for an acute poisoning event, but as a regular supplement either mixed in with their feed or available free-choice.

Here is a link to a scientific studyhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6679646/

To me this is a real game-changer and seems like such a permie thing to do. I make biochar from clean and nontoxic branches found around the property, in a cookie tin in the woodstove so now it may have all these functions:

1. Reduces the fire fuel on our land,
2. Heats the house,
3. Feeds the livestock, reduces ammonia emissions,
4. Adds carbon to the soil, pre-mixed and inoculated with gut flora in manure and distributed around the pastures by the livestock.

The link is not working for me, I think the word "study" affected it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6679646/

Sorry! Try this:


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6679646/

Also, I realized after I posted that this was not news to everyone, there were already a few relevant threads. You know, how permies lists other relevant threads at the bottom? They hadn’t come up when I searched using ‘biochar’ and ‘livestock’ keywords because I think the word livestock was not mentioned but relate to chickens etc. and people’s own experience - well worth reading. I think the paper I linked is new, though.  

I'm working to increase the uptake of biochar in animal feeding, as all the controlled and anecdotal evidence coming in says it's a good thing. So far, these are some data points I've gathered, either directly or via colleagues:

* My chickens love the stuff. When I used to let them free range, they would peck away at pieces in the area where I make and store biochar. I throw a shovelful into their pen every few days and they eat it up. I also use it in the bedding in their coop, where it cuts ammonia formation and allows me to go longer between changing the wood shavings.

* I've fed it to some of the cattle we've kept here, usually by mixing it with molasses and hay chaff. A few of them liked it and would eat it plain, while some others never developed a taste for it.

* I've offered it to the sheep, but so far only the matriarch ewe has shown any willingness to eat it unless it mix it with nuts. Meh. We'll keep trying.

* One of the biochar proponents I've worked with over the past few years did a stint managing a farm in the Far North. It's nearly at the tip of the narrow peninsula and has beaches on either side. The soils are either sand or peat, and the former dries out pretty badly in the summers. The farm runs beef cattle and has a lot of pine forestry, so they started making biochar from the timber slash and offcuts to apply to the pasture on the sandy side. Then they decided to try feeding it to the animals. They split a group of heifers into two: one to feed biochar and one as control, and grazed them on adjoining paddocks. They fed the biochar mob 300 g per day, initially mixed with molasses, but soon skipped that. When the heifers saw the quad bike coming with the trailer each day, they would come running and jostle one another out of the way to get at the trough.

Preliminary results from the trial: The animals that got biochar grew faster, with average weight gain 25% higher than the control mob. They also had no intestinal parasites (fecal egg counts close to zero) and were healthier in general.

* An organic dairy farmer in my region had a bunch of replacement heifers get into trouble with parasite burdens last autumn. Under our organic standards, you're allowed to do one acute anthelmintic drench per year if it's to save your animals, so he bit the bullet and treated them. As they recovered, he started offering them biochar ad lib and they took a liking to it. When I caught up with him before the holidays, he told me he had just run them over the scales, hoping that they would have recovered enough that their weight gain would be back at normal for their age and genetics. They were 30 kg heavier on average.

So far, everything looks really positive for the critters that eat it. Farmers have observed for decades that when they burn stumps or slash piles, cattle always eat whatever fragments of charcoal remain. We've also found that they tend to like bigger chunks as opposed to finely ground material, and that they prefer hardwood biochar to pine (presumably because the higher mineral content makes it tastier).

I'm curious as to the why of improved weight gain.
What is happening that leads to this?
If it is inoculated with bacteria beforehand,  I suppose  it could be the bacteria being digested?

The biochar was not pre-inoculated as far as I know. We have a few hypotheses as to the cause of the weight gain. The main one is the reduction in internal parasites...those little worms eat quite a bit and that's nutrition that the cattle aren't getting. Then there's the secondary effect of removing the parasite burden, which is less stress and better health in general.

Other possibilities we think might be at play are mineral nutrients, and the pore structure of the biochar facilitating better digestion in the rumen. We have some studies claiming a reduction in methane production, which says to me that the carbohydrates that aren't being converted anaerobically might instead be getting absorbed by the animal.

I haven’t read the whole link, but like that type of reading. This an exert from link, dealing with microbial life and extreme conductivity of biochar, in the gut.

Inside the gastro-intestinal tract, nearly all feed-degrading reactions are facilitated by microorganisms (mostly bacteria, archaea and ciliates). Within those reactions, bacterial cells may transfer electrons to biofilms or via biofilms to other terminal electron acceptors (Richter et al., 2009; Kracke, Vassilev & Krömer, 2015). However, biofilms are rather poor electric conductors and the electron-accepting capacity is low. Hence, microbial redox reactions can be optimized by electron shuttles, such as humic acids or activated biochar whose electrical conductivity is 100–1,000 times higher than that of biofilms (Aeschbacher et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2012; Saquing, Yu & Chiu, 2016). Although the conductivity of non-activated biochar is lower compared to activated biochar, it has been shown that it can efficiently transfer electrons between bacterial cells (Chen et al., 2015; Sun et al., 2017). Bacteria were shown to donate an electron to a biochar particle while other bacteria of different species took up (accepted) an electron at another site of the same biochar particle. The biochar acts here like a “battery” (or electron buffer) that can be charged and discharged, depending on the need of biochemical (microbial) reactions (Liu et al., 2012). Moreover, as biochar can be temporarily oxidized or reduced by microbes (i.e., biochar is depleted or enriched in electrons), it can buffer situations with a (temporary) lack of electron donors or terminal electron acceptors (redox buffering effect) (Saquing, Yu & Chiu, 2016). A principal aim of feeding biochar to animals could thus be to overcome metabolic redox limitations by enhancing electron exchange between microbes, and between microbes and terminal electron acceptors.

I also thought it was interesting that low temp biochar acted like a battery, high temp acted as a conductor. I wonder if it’s low enough temp while burning leaves into charcoal?

Oh, this is interesting!

Andrea, Phil, what do you inoculate the charcoal with to make the biochar?

What comes to the ”some of the animals eat it but others do not”, could it be that those that don’t eat it are just not in need of it? Cravings are there for a reason!

..not the cinnamon roll craving tho, but those oranges I have been thinking a lot lately.. (And the pregnant lady wanting to eat mud, it’s the minerals her body craves!)

Just a thought!

I think the form that is generally fed to livestock is uninoculated (so, not yet technically biochar) when it goes into the feed and comes out the other end of the animal as biochar inoculated with gut flora. Normally the inoculation process if not intended for feed would be to mix the char with compost, or soil, or soak it in a compost tea, etc, and I can’t see that being palatable to all livestock. My goats would turn their noses up at it, I am pretty sure. I do think chickens would enjoy scratching it into the compost or soil, though, and then eating the somewhat inoculated char and completing the inoculation as it passes through them.
The beauty of feeding it directly to livestock is they can do the inoculating and also spread the biochar through the field for you. I also read that it may be effective against some parasites. Tapeworms and coccidiosis in particular. I wonder if that is part of the explanation of why animals fed biochar may grow faster and be healthier. Hard to untangle that from the inactivating and removal of toxins a by char, and some experiments are unclear because they mixed char and molasses to make it more palatable but there are enough without molasses to show an effect.

That’s the one thing I was disappointed with that ncbi article. It dealt nothing with parasites, they have all these tests they run, but much of their positive result could be due to to less parasitism, which they did not check for anywhere during the tests, or at least it does not appear that way.

To clarify something regarding terminology...when I refer to biochar I am using the IBI definition ( see https://biochar-international.org/faqs/) and I consider any high-quality charcoal made from renewable biomass source material and destined for long-term incorporation in soil, water, or the built environment to be biochar. Whether or not it's inoculated is just an application detail.

I know that there is a sizable community who call it charcoal until it's has some microbial life added to it. I'm going off prior art here and since it's intentionally produced for its climate mitigation attributes plus all the amazing things it does in literally hundreds of real-world applications, I use the term coined for the purpose.

Andrea Locke wrote:
The beauty of feeding it directly to livestock is they can do the inoculating and also spread the biochar through the field for you.

This is brilliant. And makes more sense than my weird thinking about inoculated biochar. I had the impression that inoculated charcoal = biochar but I stand corrected!


Phil, thank you for clearing up the terminology! It all makes more sense now.

My dog loves to eat my biochar! I have to move her away from it. She also loves to eat compost.  They are scavengers, who naturally eat a wide variety of things.  

I think Andrea has an intriguing idea, looking into the removal of toxins. Many doctors have used charcoal with humans who have a large toxin burden, especially heavy metals.  Although it's a bit rough, many are much healthier after they have removed lead, arsenic, mercury, or aluminum.  The biofilm idea might be part of it as well. Many people have diseases, and biofilms can stop our internal biology/ immune systems from finding unhealthy dynamics within our bodies.

It's intriguing to think about what may be the reason why the animals are eating it.

John S
PDX OR

Saana Jalimauchi wrote:

I had the impression that inoculated charcoal = biochar but I stand corrected!

That is exactly the way I, and as Phil said, a sizeable number of other people define it.  My view is that charcoal is the term that has been used for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years for the product we are making.  That was the term long before anyone coined the term biochar.  Charcoal, to my knowledge has always been sourced from renewable biomass.  The end use doesn't change the name of the product in my mind, any more than cast iron that will be made into a pan for cooking would have a different name than cast iron that will be made into an engine block.  

One other point I would add to the intentionality of making biochar is the production method, and specifically the pyrolysis temperature. Biochar is produced at temperatures between 400 and 750 degrees C. If the temperature is too low, the volatile hydrocarbons are not fully driven off. This is great for charcoal intended as fuel for heating and cooking, as it will be easier to light and produce more heat. But it sucks for biochar, because the pore structure will be poor to nonexistent (clogged up with tars), and much of the carbon content will remain in a form that degrades over time. Also, the graphene complexes that provide molecular attachment points for nutrient ions don't start forming until you get above 400 degrees.

If the treatment temperature gets higher than 750-800 degrees, the graphene structures start to fuse together and collapse into sheets, losing the attachment points around the edges. The micropores disappear as well, so this material won't provide the soil benefits of biochar...the aeration, water retention, and microbial habitat functionality is diminished or lost entirely.

This is a big part of why I have chosen to use the IBI terminology. I don't want to give the impression that you can take low-grade charcoal full of tars and gunk (or something at the other end of the scale that's practically graphite), soak it in compost tea or whatever, and suddenly have something that will do your soil a whole lot of good for the long haul...because it won't work. This is not to say that "accidental" biochar is worthless...most of it is good, because the temperatures reached in a wood fire are conveniently in the sweet spot for decent pyrolysis.

To follow Phil's comment, another related point.  When the biochar is heated enough, drenching it with water opens it up.  It kind of cracks. This allows more spaces for microbes to live in, which is the primary positive feature of biochar, as I understand it.  It also then retains water better and also lets it drain better.  Sorry that I don't remember the exact scientific terminology for this.

John S
PDX OR

Phil Stevens wrote:One other point I would add to the intentionality of making biochar is the production method, and specifically the pyrolysis temperature. Biochar is produced at temperatures between 400 and 750 degrees C. If the temperature is too low, the volatile hydrocarbons are not fully driven off. This is great for charcoal intended as fuel for heating and cooking, as it will be easier to light and produce more heat. But it sucks for biochar, because the pore structure will be poor to nonexistent (clogged up with tars), and much of the carbon content will remain in a form that degrades over time. Also, the graphene complexes that provide molecular attachment points for nutrient ions don't start forming until you get above 400 degrees.

If the treatment temperature gets higher than 750-800 degrees, the graphene structures start to fuse together and collapse into sheets, losing the attachment points around the edges. The micropores disappear as well, so this material won't provide the soil benefits of biochar...the aeration, water retention, and microbial habitat functionality is diminished or lost entirely.

This is a big part of why I have chosen to use the IBI terminology. I don't want to give the impression that you can take low-grade charcoal full of tars and gunk (or something at the other end of the scale that's practically graphite), soak it in compost tea or whatever, and suddenly have something that will do your soil a whole lot of good for the long haul...because it won't work. This is not to say that "accidental" biochar is worthless...most of it is good, because the temperatures reached in a wood fire are conveniently in the sweet spot for decent pyrolysis.

What do you think about success of Terra Preta?  Is it your contention that the ancient people that created it were able to make biochar that was formed at the temperatures needed?  My own thoughts are along the lines that people were burning garbage and burying it, and had no interest in what temperatures were used.  In doing so, they probably didn't make perfect charcoal with all the hydrocarbons burned off.  Still, 2500 years later, the soil is very fertile and is indeed what most of us are trying to recreate when incorporating biochar into our soil.  

It may be that you are right about the "accidental" biochar as you called it, and it did happen fall into the sweet spot with regards to temperature.  I don't know what the "normal" temperature of say a campfire is.  400-750 is a pretty wide range, so maybe that is the temperatures they normally reached.  

All in all, I find it a fascinating subject.  I don't mean to disparage the group that calls any charcoal destined for soil improvement "biochar".  My only interest in the terminology at all is that it sometimes lends confusion to the discussion if two different definitions are being used.  Anyone adding to the knowledge base regarding this helps us all.

I think that their orientation to time was different than ours.  They didn't have jobs to show up for, taxes to sign, garbage and recycling to put out, etc.  

They had a lot of time to observe what worked and what didn't, in the health of the land and in the health of their people.  Their lore was taught person to person.  If they saw that one method didn't work, they had a lot of chances to observe closely and fix that.  Somehow, they were able to achieve a lot without double blind, placebo controlled laboratory studies.

JohN S
PDX OR

Trace Oswald wrote:
It may be that you are right about the "accidental" biochar as you called it, and it did happen fall into the sweet spot with regards to temperature.  I don't know what the "normal" temperature of say a campfire is.  400-750 is a pretty wide range, so maybe that is the temperatures they normally reached.  

The ‘burn zone’ that is marked on my woodstove thermometer for a low-creosote burn is above 300 F to about 600 F. Temperature is measured on the chimney about 6 inches or so above the stove so the actual fire is hotter. With dry wood it’s pretty easy to keep the burn in this zone. So this suggests the range for good biochar production (i.e., char that interacts well with the biology in the soil) is right in the ballpark of a campfire or forest fire. I do know I can make good quality char (at least, it makes that sort of tinkling sound that it is supposed to) from wood scraps in a cookie tin in my wood stove without doing anything but keeping it in the burn zone.

I don’t think this is a coincidence. I have absolutely no evidence, but I’m going to speculate that over millennia of forest fires, soil micro-organisms evolved to make use of the burnt woody debris that was a valuable supply of carbon and other resources. Biota that were the best adapted to occupy and make use of the burnt material prospered. This would explain why what comes out of a natural fire is exactly what the soil biology needs and can best colonize. A lot of our distant or in some cases not so distant ancestors probably belonged to cultures that periodically burned land to maintain or restore the fertility.

I'm curious about the low fired char that still contains hydrocarbons.  
Are there organisms that eat these hydrocarbons?
Wood vinegar is one of the things you can collect from charcoal making that's a good fertilizer.

If we think of history, way more than 99% of the wood that has fallen in the forest was eaten by microbes.  That's how it returns to soil.  This is a part of nature.  When we burn organic material and try to make biochar, you are burning off those tars and oils, as Phil said.  Organically and naturally rotted wood is great for adding fungi for growing woody plants like trees and bushes.  Burning it to the point of making biochar makes an excellent framework for microbes, but different ones, as they won't be eating the tannins, oils, tars, etc, and the natural stuff stays in the cycle of growth and death, while biochar sequesters carbon specifically because it gets out of that cycle.  Each one has a gap of time before those microbes can really get going.  But the outcomes are different.  They both retain moisture in the soil, but biochar is better at improving drainage, and it tends to add some alkalinity to the soil. Naturally rotting wood will have worms and other creatures that eat it, while biochar focuses on the microbes.

John S
PDX OR

It sounds like the leftover tars and oils in "bad bio-char" will be eaten by something but will that process leave behind the carbon scaffolding we would like?

I'm not advocating purposeful creation of sub par biochar, but I am hoping/suggesting there might be  wiggle room in what kinds char can be useful for soil building.

Rotting wood is clearly good for soil building, particularly if you are trying to grow woody plants, like trees or bushes.  As Elaine Ingham says, if you want enough fungi in the soil for your woody plants to grow well, you have to give them something to eat.  Organic material, such as wood, is their preferred food.  If someone were to collect campfire wood or try to gather partially burned wood, it would have some of the charred latticework that benefits microbes so much, some ash for alkalinity, and some of the tars and oils that bacteria can eat, so I would guess that it's in between woody organic material (hugulkultur) and biochar.  If you don't inoculate the biochar portion, it will suck up the nutrition from your soil, of course.  I have planted with rotten wood way before I ever heard of hugulkultur, but I make sure it is rotted, so I won't remove too many nutrients from the soil in the process.

John S
PDX OR

The tars and oils will get decomposed, but what gets left behind still won't be anywhere near the quality of biochar that was produced at higher temps. No microporosity, no graphene complexes. It won't be worthless, but a far cry from the good stuff. And good stuff is so easy to make: just dig a pit or trench, or use a steam table pan in your home fire.