Bio-char Correspondence, A

Hi D -

I've heard your name a billion times because many Zambians tend to think all Americans know one another; however I am familiar with your work with XXXXXX/ XX XXXX and have eaten your peanut butter and breakfast cereal very often. My name is Carl Wahl and I work for Concern Worldwide in Western Province heading up the Conservation Agriculture projects in Mongu, Kaoma, and Senanga (plus many new districts we're not sure of yet). 

I would love to hear more about your bio-mass / charcoal project. Are you trying to do distributed or centralized production? We (NGI, CeLIM, and myself) are working on various ways to make cheap and clean sources of charcoal; NGI and I are more interested in bio-char as a soil amendment because of our incredibly sandy soils; CeLim through Caritas and the Mongu Diocese are looking for ways to make sustainable charcoal. 

Currently, I'm been banging around with a TLUD system using a very slightly modified 55 gallon drum. Great if you have a uniform product of sufficient size to ensure airflow (e.g. bamboo or pigeon pea stems), but I think you'd need some forced air and a good draft for things like rice husks / sawdust. The big thing with smaller diameter feedstock is that it's hard to get good combustion of the gases driven of by the pyrolysis ... without that, you get a very smoky (and GHG-wise a very dirty) burn. 

Another thing I'm likely going to pilot at Kasisi in the next month or two is a double-drum system, e.g. a smaller diameter drum filled with feedstock upside-down inside a 55-gallon drum; in the airspace between the drums, you pack in a dry fuelsource that "bakes" the feedstock in the inner drum, eventually flaring off the volatiles in a relatively clean process. However, you need to gather additional biomass to get the process going. 

One thing we have identified for sure with the CeLim folks: making briquettes from bimass feedstock using an extruder and then making the charcoal hasn't worked very well, as the charring process weakens the briquettes and makes a lighter density, cold-burning (relatively) product. We'd like to figure out a way to make the char first, crush the char, mix with an adherent (e.g., shredded and boiled cassava), and then extrude.

Blah-blah-blah. Would enjoy meeting up with you sometime and chatting about what worked in XXXXXXX province as we did some of the same stuff in Senanga. 

Best,

Carl 

The First Rain

It rained hard on Saturday night ... I can't say for how long, because I kept flitting in and out of sleep.
In my bouts of waking, I would listen to the pups mewl (they can't really bark or howl yet, thank God) in response to the lashing rain. That sounds really hard, leaving the four of them out in the elements, but I will be giving them away to people who have even less sympathies for canines. The dogs will, as they say here, get used.

The rain, though too early for planting, was opportunely timed for me. In July, I dug 20-some lines of planting basins in my largish backyard in an attempt to show empathy with the beneficiary farmers to whom I'm responsible. Unfortunately, as our soil has a sand (large grain) composition of 90-95%, meaning it's like digging hole in a beach ... they tend to not retain any shape for long due to wind, the looseness of the soil, the  packs of dogs that transit through my backyard, etc. So, all my holes had somehow slumped, and I haven't had time to put anything in them (in terms of organic inputs).

The hard rain was opportune because it hardened up the soil enough for me to dig out the basins early Sunday morning and backfill half of them with the charcoal (bio-char) I've been making in a piecemeal fashion since June. I say half, as I want to do some side-to-side comparisons of the growth of two or three purchased maize varieties:

• A hybrid [Pannar 53]
• An open-pollinated variety OPV [ZamSeed 521]\
• A mixed bag of traditional varieties [mbonyi a sizo])

I'm not sure if my charcoal will last, but I may extend the experiment to the other half of my plot, where I intend to grow four or five varieties of beans:

• Haricot beans
• Sugar beans (Pan 148)
• Pinto beans
• Velvet beans
• Jack beans

And groundnuts:

• Natal common (more common in Southern Zambia)
• Chishango (what we promote with our farmers)
• An unnamed white variety
• MGV4 (a red variety)

Though it's not a scientific experiment, it will be something to look at down the line.