Terra Preta and the new "Eco-Logical" reinterpritation.
-Alan Reed Bishop/Hip-Gnosis Seed Development/Homegrown Goodness
Amongst the most important historical, anthropological, archiological, and agriculture discoveries of recent times is the study of Terra Preta (or Dark Soil), a type of soil discovered in the Amazonian River Delta area.
This soil has been an enigma in and off itself for centuries and is only now becoming well known and understood (to an extent). The soil seems to be man made with agricultural purposes in mind making us rethink just exactly what natural and pristine conditions are (man made evolutionary ideas, agricultural alchemy) in a place as isolated and as previously thought (due to poor and thin soils) uninhabitable as the Amazoinian basin. There is no doubt that there were large and herto undiscovered, agriculturally advanced, civilizations just as described by Francisco de Orellana (could the golden city of El Dorado actually exist? After all if you don't have to worry about feeding yourself you do have time to work on other projects! Could these high population levels and advanced agriculture have led to advanced civilization altogether? Atlantis?).
Apparently no one has yet to exactly discover, unravel, or truly understand how Terra Preta was made. We do know that it is a stable soil, more stable than any soil on earth, and that it does self replicate (living inert material? Indeed!). 1,000 years after it was deposited it is still just as fertile and active as ever, only needing to lie fallow for six months at a time (if at all, one farmer described farming the same plot for 40 years without break!).
Anyhow, there seem to be modern organic growers that are experimenting with bio-char (a fancy term for charcoal) and I have spent a good deal of my day researching all of this and providing links, currently my brain is formulating ideas about how this could work on a small farm like Bishop's Homegrown, I already have a good idea on how to create the active carbon charcoal I would need to start the process. 2009 will see trials with these methods on the small scale, I presume success, in which case the trials will grow into the large scale and eventually a soil amending traditional practice.
P.S. I have done some thinking upon this method today and I think I have a decent grasp on just exactly what is going on in the Terra Preta soil, I will be updating shortly with more information. I also did some rough calculations on the amount of land in the Amazoinia Basin that was converted to Terra Preta, it is mind blowing to say the least, roughly 63,031.5 square miles at a six foot depth of land was developed in this way, with bio-intensive type methods the poupulation support could have been stagering to say the least!
What follows are some of what I found on the net, the first is from NatGeo and I highly reccomend watching the replay of the program for more info:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081119-lost-cities-amazon_2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_earth
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehma....%20strategy.pdf
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
