Origins of biochar-Terra Preta

Mike Farmer wrote:Is the Terra Preta biochar well weathered and broken down because of time, or do we suspect/know that those creating it ground/crushed the char?  I'm asking because I don't know the answer...I always assumed the creation was always more "accidental, but then more on purpose once they saw some benefits" but I have no clue what type of preparations they may have done.

I assume it was an accidental discovery as well.  Exactly how/when they found out that small/weathered char works well isn't really important except for academic interest.  The key lesson is that we can see black soil working today,.  Enough early adopters have studied and reproduced the effect to encourage the next wave to try it.  We are still very early in the adoption process, but we are now trying to reproduce it using an accelerated process to get results as quickly as possible.  As threads here show, people are trying different techniques to produce/use biochar and helping others.  Whatever the old process, we are charting our own way based on that old knowledge.

Yes, we are trying to back engineer something that ancient people created.
John S
PDX OR

As I understand it, some of the Conquistadors from Spain were trying to steal gold from the Incas.  One group was searching for El Dorado, which they wanted to be a city of pure gold.  That city never existed but they aggressively asked the Indians where it was.  They got lost and rafted down a river. The leader's name was Francisco de Orellana.  After a long time, they realized that there was no way they could return up river after going through so many rapids.  Werner Herzog made a movie about this.  I think it was called "Aguirre-the Wrath of God". Eventually they came to a huge city in the middle of the rainforest. They described it as the biggest and most beautiful city they had seen.  Eventually, they continued on and eventually came to the sea. By now, you have probably realized that the river was the Amazon.  To get back to Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic), they had to make a sailboat from natural materials. It was the early 1500's.  It somehow eventually worked and they got to Hispaniola. Then they got on a real sailboat and went back to Spain. When they got there, they told everyone about this amazing place and the agriculture and the soil.  They all laughed at them and called them liars.  

In the 20th century, various people went to Brazil and did research, telling Westerners about this phenomenon.  Wim Sombroek was not the first, nor the last, but one of the most influential.  Interest in biochar waxed and waned until the end of the 1900's, when various researchers developed means of replicating the soil and publishing studies about how it can be used.  It started to gain more popularity when it was realized that it could be used to sequester carbon, thereby mitigating climate change.   Among the most influential researchers was a German professor at Cornell , who decided to go down there and figure out if it was real.  His name is Johannes Lehman. He was just awarded a major prize from Biochar International.   When he went there, he found that the soil was still 3' deep! The people were gone, centuries before.  In the tropical rainforest, the top soil is normally 1/4 inch deep.  So he studied it.  When he removed some of the soil, the remaining soil 'healed" and recovered over time. When he brought some of that terra preta to the United States and tried to grow things on it, it grew really well!  It even grew in size.  They started to back engineer it and figure out what they did to make it so good.  They found charcoal, bits of clay, and typical remains of human settling: food, feces, etc.  They couldn't determine whether it was made on purpose or accidentally, or whether it happened accidentally and they continued with it because it worked so well.  Now, many of us are trying to learn what they did to make such excellent soil.

JohN S
PDX OR

It was Dutch soil scientist Wim Sombroek who rediscovered Terra Preta, not Johannes Lehman

It was certainly developed by indigenous Amazonians.  Francisco de Orellana discovered it for the rest of the world.  Wim Sombroek was someone who let modern Western civilization know about it. Sombroek was neither the first, nor the last modern Westerner to inform others about biochar, but he was very important in getting people to know about it.  He died in 2003, when very few people in modern societies had heard of biochar, or knew what it was.  Johannes Lehmann and several others really developed the research, showing the value of biochar and the application to our society. They have since demonstrated various ways in which it can be made useful in modern agriculture.  Many of us today are experimenting with newer and better ways to make biochar work for us in the modern world. The research continues.

John S
PDX OR