Josiah T. Settle

Transcription

John Kohler: Alright this is John Kohler with GrowingYourGreens.com! Sort of another exciting episode for you and as you guys can see, got biochar piles to me on each side and I have returned to the home, once again, of Josiah Hunt, who I consider one of my biochar mentors in all this stuff and, you know, I’ve learned a lot from Josiah. And I wanted to visit him again, actually, to make you guys a specific episode on activating your biochar, right? I know many of you guys got excited about biochar after I made some episodes with Josiah and maybe you went out and bought some raw, virgin biochar. I like raw, virgin biochar myself! But, you know, that being said, you need to activate the biochar and Josiah and I talked about this, but we didn’t really put a big focus on it, but this video, I really wanna put a big focus on activating your biochar because I know there’s people out there using biochar and they’re saying, “I use the biochar and look! I grew a tomato with the biochar and without and, like, nothing happened man! The biochar stuff was even worse than the stuff, than without the biochar!” Right? And you could use any product and any product may or may not work. It depends on application rates and all this kind of stuff, but a big part of it is if it is activated or not. Very important. And activating it does not simply mean adding some worm castings, adding some rock dust, and mixing it, putting it in a bag, and selling it, because there are companies out there that are just simply blending ingredients, putting it in a bag, and selling it. That’s not the same thing as activating it. So in this episode, we’re gonna get with Josiah in just a little bit to teach you guys five ways on how to activate your biochar so you’re gonna get the best results out of your biochar, because, you know, I wanna teach you functional gardening and teach you guys things that will actually work in your garden if done properly, right? One of the main reasons, for me, that you ought to activate your biochar is cause you’ll see more and better and consistent results with your biochar instead of, like, running some test, you know, trying it, and then it doesn’t work and then you make a video to try to tell people biochar doesn’t work, right? Well, did you use it in the right way? You know, so, that’s very important to me, but aside from that, there are real scientific reasons that you want to also activate your biochar. Number one is to balance the pH, you know. The biochar that’s raw, as it comes, is, you know, maybe not the best pH balance for your garden but once you activate it, it’s a much better pH for your garden. Number two is to balance the macronutrients, you know. When you burn wood, or whatever you’re making the biochar out of, when you burn it, you lose all the nitrogen, right? So you wanna activate it. It brings back the nitrogen and better balances the biochar out. And number three is probably the most important thing: it increases the cat ion exchange. So what is cat ion exchange for, like, people that don’t understand that? Well, it’s hard to really put into words if you don’t get it. I’ve been trying to really rack my brain for a really good analogy and the only one I could really come up with is kinda like this: we’ve all had that plant or little potted plant that has the potting soil in there, you put the plant in there, and then you like let it dry it out just a little bit too much, right? And then you try to water it and then the water just like flows over it, it doesn’t, like, bond with the soil until you literally dunk the whole pot in water and then it finally absorbs and then once it’s absorbing water, it’ll readily accept and easily absorb more water, right? And that’s kinda like the biochar. If it’s not activated fully, right, things, like, kinda run off it. There’s a lot of surface area that’s not being sucked up with different cool, gooey acids and nutrients and humates and all kinds of good stuff. And that’s why activating your biochar is really good and also another thing that comes to my mind for activated biochar is that, like, the sum is worth more than its parts. So now all the different spaces on the biochar are, you know, a kind of charcoal, for that matter, has different nutrients and acids and bacteria and foods for the microbes and microbe explosion in populations. It’s just so much better. In addition, you know, it’s a lot harder to burn or to get negative results with activated biochar. Like, I actually wanna show you right over there, growing in, like, a container garden. And, so yeah, let’s head over there and I’ll show you how much biochar you can actually use if it’s been activated. Alright, so this is an excellent use of a bath tub when you’re done with it. Maybe you’re upgrading yours, maybe you just go to the junkyard and find old used bath tubs. They make an excellent container garden cause think about it: they all drain down to one point so you could even collect the water coming out and put it back in so you can conserve water in these times of drought. Actually biochar is another really good thing you could use in the times of drought as well. But I’m not here to talk about that, I’m here to talk about this taro or callow that’s been growing in here and, just, under the shade of a tree in this soil here. And this soil—look at it! That soil is nice and dark and black and the soil is 80 percent biochar. That’s insane. Normally, you know, that’s too high of a mixture and that would not work, but this was done as a test experiment and it’s worked very well. Now, even in these poor conditions, and I’m not necessarily recommending you guys go out and grow food in 80 percent biochar because we should have a whole bunch of other stuff, but as an experiment to show you what you—what is possible and that you can’t really burn or get negative results with 80 percent biochar if done properly and it’s properly activated. They grew these taro roots and check that out! One big taro root! And this is what some of the root mass looked like. These were just tore out the other day. Look at that! That’s the root system and the taro. Eighty percent biochar…now the only reason why this works is this biochar has been activated. You could also call it fermented, or I like to say colonized, right? Think about it: if we sent men to the moon, right? We sent men to the moon and they had some, you know, packets of that freeze dried ice cream and the freeze dried stuff—yeah, a few men could live on the moon for a little bit. But what about if we sent men to the moon with, like, you know, a hydroponic system and they could start growing their own food and they could start producing their own air. Then we could slowly start colonizing the moon and start spreading out and people could take over the moon and we could make the moon a good place. And that’s literally what you’re doing with the biochar when you start to activate it and colonize it. You’re literally adding a lot of different things to the biochar, especially the microorganisms, right? Super critical, super important, you’re making some of the minerals more available and this is my style of gardening. This is biologic, organic gardening, right? We’re using the biology and that’s really what makes the biochar work. Biochar in itself is not like some magical, mystical answer, right? But it’s part of the solution. It’s a very important part of the solution is to activate it. So what I wanna do next for you guys in this episode is to get with Josiah Hunt and we’re gonna show you guys five ways to activate your biochar so you’re gonna get the best results in your garden. So now I’m with Josiah Hunt and we’re on his farm and he’s gonna share with you guys the first way to activate your biochar. But before we get into that, Josiah, you know, give me your most important reason on why people out there should activate their biochar like you’re gonna show em fives ways right now. Josiah Hunt: The most important reason why they should activate their biochar? John Kohler: The most important one reason—yeah! Josiah Hunt: Better results. Hands down. John Kohler: Better results! Totally agree! So, what are we doing for the first way to activate your biochar? This is really easy! Any of you guys out there that own a home and have neighbors or even maybe yourselves could do. Josiah Hunt: Yeah…the grass clippings: they’re easy, they’re ubiquitous, they’re kinda everywhere. So I just got some fresh cut grass clippings and some biochar. I’ve just got it, really easy to remember here: half and half. Okay, so I’m just gonna dump it right on the ground and we’re gonna get going, okay? John Kohler: Alright! One five gallon bucket of grass clippings, one five gallon bucket of biochar. Spread this out—wow! This is nice and warm! I like that! Spread it out and mix it on up. Now, we’re doing it caveman style. You guys could use a rake, shovel, you know, whatever farm instruments or farm animals you’d like. Alright, Josiah, so you know, what are we doing here and why does this work? Josiah Hunt: Okay, what we’re doing right here is we’re creating a very—we’re creating a moist, nutrient rich, and microbially active environment and what’s gonna happen here is this fresh, naked char is gonna become completely colonized and matured by this microbial explosion that’s gonna happen in here. And so it’s gonna, things are gonna get hot. There’s gonna be nutrients changing form, microbes just exploding and exploring and the biochar is gonna come out of here different than when it went in. When it comes out of here, there’s a whole laundry list of big, long scientific names that explain how and why, but basically, it comes out mature. And we’ve, we’ve, you know, in the biochar industry been enamored with the idea of the terra pretna soils of the Amazon basin and these soils are just undeniably fertile and rich and amazing. Well, what—how can we recreate that? One of the things we find is that biochar matures. Biochar matures in soil a lot slower than it does in a nice pile like this. So, mix it up in a nice little pile. It’s really important to remember that the biochar is not gonna shrink. The biochar that you put in here will not decompose. These grass clippings are gonna shrink a lot. So it looks, like, whoa! That’s a lot of grass clippings man! It’s 50 percent grass clippings. By the time this is done, it’s just gonna look like biochar with some goop around it, around the edges, and what you’re gonna wanna do is you’re gonna wanna cover this up. You’re gonna wanna cover it up with some cardboard or banana leaves or some palm leaves or some, just even, some brown leaves from whatever trees you got nearby. Now you’re gonna wanna cover it up and leave it in kind of a nice, dark, moist place for a while, maybe even wet it down if it doesn’t rain. And what will happen naturally is you’ll probably get a lot of worms coming up in here and the worms will come up in here and they’re just gonna kinda even do more magic. And you’re gonna wanna let this sit until the grass is mostly composted, so I would say a few months at least. This would be something that’d be good to do in the fall especially, if you’re planning on—or I mean you could be doing it all summer. And then you’d have the material ready for next spring. John Kohler: Yeah, start a couple different piles and, you know, when you clip your grass, right? Add half biochar, just make new piles around and then you can harvest them at different times to add to your garden. Alright, well that looks great! Super simple, super easy! Anyone out there could do this one. We’ll be back at ya with the way number two to activate your biochar. So now we’re gonna show you guys way number two to activate your biochar and it’s with two things that many companies actually already sell you but yet it’s not activated, just with the one bucket of biochar, one bucket of the worm castings. So what do we got going on here Josiah? Josiah Hunt: Well, I’m gonna take some worm castings, about five gallons, and I’m gonna take an equal amount of biochar, about five gallons. John Kohler: And once again, we’re gonna go ahead and mix that up. Josiah Hunt: Mix these together and I think of this kinda like a middle school dance, where ya got the girls and the boys and the girls are on one side and the boys are on the other. Even though we’re sitting here blending this all up, like, hey man! Everyone’s mingling. On a microscopic level, on the microbial level, they haven’t really bonded yet. And you know, this is not a bad mix like this, but I like to step things up a notch and I guess, using that same analogy, let’s bring in the DJ. John Kohler: Alright, the DJ will get things moving! Dancing! You know, we wanna get everything in here dancing around. Josiah Hunt: So I’m just gonna use some flour. So what’s going on here is the interaction is really only happening at the surface and what I want is I want to cause a microbial explosion in here. I wanna cause a microbial explosion where the microbes are just expanding and colonizing the surfaces of the biochar and everything kinda bonds at that point, glued together with all the, you know, I think we’ve stepped out, you know, we’ve stepped up to a frat party now, you know, we’re in a fraternity party now. And it’s gonna be a big, gooey mess by the time we’re done, which is great because that’s the glues and the enzymes and the acids, the organic acids, that makes the living soil so much more powerful than the dead soil. So, on this, less than five percent is all you need, much less than five percent. So that was ten gallons there. One gallon—three percent of one gallon would be one cup, so I’m just gonna wing it and I’m just gonna go ahead and say about half of this. That looks pretty good. John Kohler: This is especially good to do if you have like some old flour or some flour that’s got some bugs in it you need to get rid of…and we’re just gonna mix this stuff up. Josiah Hunt: Now we’re gonna mix this up. Mix it up. John Kohler: And the biochar. And the worm castings, man, they’re partying now. So Josiah, what’s gonna happen? Because this stuff is mixed, how long are we gonna let it sit and what’s gonna happen to this stuff? Josiah Hunt: Well, what’s gonna happen is pretty darn quickly, pretty darn quickly this is gonna get connected. This whole thing—what you wanna do is cover it. You wanna cover it so it’s shaded and you wanna make sure it's nice and moist and cool and the whole thing is gonna get connected with microbial—I’m sorry, with fungal hi-fi. A fungal network is gonna really lock this stuff in. It’s beautiful to watch. The smells are gonna change, it’s gonna become completely connected with fungal hi-fi. And what’s important is that you don’t need to flour in particularly. The important thing is the food source, you know, we’re looking for a food source. So molasses—I was just, I just wanted to pick a nice, very common thing that you might be able to find. And like you said, you know, if you’ve got some flour going bad, that’s a great way to use it. So other things that you might find in the kitchen or the store: corn meal, molasses is another great one—a little bit of molasses in here would be really good. I just didn’t have any molasses today. So yeah, so that’s what’s gonna happen—this whole thing is gonna become alive— John Kohler: And how long do you need to let it sit? Josiah Hunt: This one’s gonna be a lot faster than the grass clippings over here. This one’ll be done—you know, the longer, the better but really, you can harvest this in about two weeks. John Kohler: Wow. Josiah Hunt: Yeah, it’ll be very very different in just one week. But let it kinda finish up, so give it a good two weeks. If you give it two months, even better. But you can probably feel it already changed the consistency of this, right? John Kohler: Yeah, kinda like when you add flour to like a recipe, right? It starts to bring it together! Josiah Hunt: Yeah, so already, it just kind of—it really changed the consistency and my goodness! Tomorrow this thing is gonna be alive, I tell ya. John Kohler: Cool man. Up next, we’re gonna show you way number three to activate your biochar. Now we’re gonna share with you guys way number three to activate your biochar. It’s simple for you guys who have a chicken coop or have some chickens. You’re simply gonna take the char, open up the chicken coop door, and chuck the char in there! Check it out man! The biochar acts as an amazing deodorizer for the chickens, but Josiah, how does this exactly work? Josiah Hunt: Well it works, like you said, it’s an amazing deodorizer and the chickens just keep on pooping, keep on pooping, and you throw the food in there and the scraps and it gets plenty energized with nutrients and there’s actually a good amount of living microorganisms. But then, too, when you take out that litter, when you take out all that litter, you’re gonna wanna kinda put that all in a pile and let it finish off for a little bit. But really, I only clean this thing out maybe once a year. Last time I cleaned it out was…long than that! So yeah, the biochar really helps to keep the odors down. The poop just seems to kinda, just, it does great. I mean, can you smell anything? John Kohler: No I can’t. And how often to you add char and how much do you add to your chicken coop and how many chickens you got? Josiah Hunt: Good point. I’ve got about a dozen chickens. They only spend the night in here and they run around and forage during the day. I’ve got about a dozen chickens. I put it down fairly thick in there. I put, you know, I put a good half inch to an inch of chunky char down in there with a little bit of sawdust and a little bit of compost and that works great and they just scratch around and they poop and they scratch and they poop and they scratch. Don’t really have too much problem with the odor and again, I’ll probably harvest this—I’ll usually dress it with a little more char as needed, maybe a five gallon bucket every couple months or, you know, I kinda take it as it goes. Seasonal, it can be different. Just occasionally redress a little bit more and after in a year or two I’ll harvest it all and compost it for a couple days or, I mean, a couple weeks and spread it all around the trees. John Kohler: Alright, that’s super simple. Hey, what are you doing? Stop filming! Oh my God, wait! No, seriously—this is part of the video. Way number four to activate your biochar. Wait! I’m not done peeing yet! Alright, so, way number four is—I’ll be back in a second when I’m done peeing, but this is part of it. Alright, so seriously—way number four to activate your biochar is with nature’s best nitrogen fertilizer: your pee! I love peeing on my plants and now I love peeing in my biochar because it makes my biochar better and I’m not joking at all on this. This is super serious, being super real. So the thing you wanna do is, number one, you wanna make sure your bucket’s got some holes in it. You’re gonna put it on a patch of land and then pile up leaves and some mulch and some soil around the bottom and then you’re gonna take some of that soil and mulch and simply put it on the top. I mean, this will activate your biochar. So, Josiah! How does this work really? Josiah Hunt: You know, there’s a couple different ways that you can go about this. You can gauge it on how many days, weeks, or friends you’ve had over. No, I haven’t figured out the exact science on this, on exactly when—You know, how many times have you peed in it or you know, cause it changes, like, your—anyways…It lasts for quite a while. Pee in that for quite a while. And then just kinda let it settle. And what we find is just that we actually find life coming up inside of it. You’ll find worms up inside of there and all kinds of life taking over. And then that biochar, you know, has definitely been nutrient charged, that’s for sure. And you get a lot of interesting microbial activity in there and this kind of biochar is definitely nutrient loaded. It’s really good for amending—around trees. I wouldn’t necessarily use this right next to the lettuce that I’m gonna eat in a couple weeks though, unless I put it in my soil in fall and plant in spring. So, but a great way to, a great way to utilize a very common resource. John Kohler: Awesome, yeah, I mean another thing you guys could do once you’ve charged your biochar in this fashion and do it a bunch, you know, then use this biochar and mix it with the grass clippings or activate in one of the other ways that we’re showing you to even supercharge it and kick it up to the next level. Next, we’re gonna go ahead and show you guys the last way to supercharge and activate your biochar. So now Josiah is gonna show you guys way number five to activate or charge your biochar. And actually I saved the best for last because this is actually very similar to the recipe he does for his commercial biochar, you know, that is available if you don’t wanna activate your biochar yourself. So Josiah, what are we gonna do now? Josiah Hunt: Alright, so this, this blend is—it’s a blend of biochar and a very fine micronized rock powder. John Kohler: So the rock dust that I like so much. Josiah Hunt: But the thing is that we’re not just gonna blend the two; we’re gonna bring out the DJ and let the party get going. We’re gonna culture the whole thing so that they bond and what results is very interesting. So I’m just gonna go ahead and get started and show you how to do this. Okay, alright. Alright, so this one’s kinda like, I’m gonna give it to you kinda like mixing a drink. One part, two parts, three parts, four parts biochar and one part rock powder. So this is micronized. Look. I can just squeeze it out my hands. John Kohler: You might wanna wear a dust mask when you’re playing with rock dust. Josiah Hunt: It’s just lighter than flour. So I’m gonna level this a little bit and I’m gonna start sprinkling this on and I’m gonna start mixing this in. This is like, this is like baking a cake, you know, how you mix it in is really important. You have to kinda gently mix this in, okay? So I’m gently mixing it in as I’m pouring it over the top, gently mixing it in as I’m pouring it over the top. I’m gonna stop right now because there’s a little bit more ingredients. Right? I’m not just gonna mix rock dust with raw char. I’m gonna add a little bit of flour, so microbial food. In this case, that microbial food is gonna be flour. I’m gonna add a little bit of microbial food and I’m gonna add some microbes. Now we’re gonna add some microbes into the mix. John Kohler: So the microbes that he’s adding to the mix are in the form of worm castings. You know, I love to add worm castings into my garden through any ways that I can and, you know, this is really using it as an ingredient to really activate the biochar. Alright, Josiah, so what part of worm castings or how much do they use cause we know, like, four parts biochar, one part the rock dust, but how much worm castings? Josiah Hunt: That was about one part. John Kohler: Alright, at one part worm castings. Alright, so now the last ingredient is… Josiah Hunt: The food source! So this is the food source that keeps everything going. So this is gonna be about half a part. You know, on a pile this small, you have a little more leeway. Again, I make this—I make a very similar product, pretty much this, on a much larger scale and we are very very exact with our ingredients because it matters, especially in a larger size like that. With small piles like this, you’ve got a little bit more leeway. You can, you know, a little bit hot, a little cold, you got a lot more leeway. So again we had four parts biochar, one part dust, one part rock dust, one part worm castings and now we’re gonna do less than one part of flour. Again, I’m usually using a different material. I use rice bran a lot because one of my main processing facilities is in California there’s lots of rice bran available there. It’s an underutilized resource in the area, so we utilize it for growing microbes. Okay now that’s good. Now we’re gonna mix it up a little bit more, mix it up a little bit more, and if you remember, there’s still a little bit left of that rock dust and now I’m gonna top it off, get the last little bit of rock dust in there—oh! Sorry there John. Alright, mix that up real good and John, can you feel that? John Kohler: Yeah, the consistency’s totally changed, it’s a little bit sticky and it’s like, really mixing it up really good. Now, once we got this mixed up it’s not done, so how long do we let this sit, you know, and basically ferment? Josiah Hunt: Well this is gonna be—because we don’t have wood chips or grass clippings that we have to wait for, this one’ll go a little bit quicker. You’re gonna wanna leave it for at least two weeks. Give it at least two weeks, try to be patient, give it at least two weeks. Longer is even better, but give it at least two weeks to mature and you’re gonna notice that it feels different, it feels different toward the end, and you know we found that, we found the most interesting thing with this rock powder blend. We kept going, like, oh God! It smells so good! Like I could just eat it! And then we were eating dinner and we had fresh from the garden beets and I was like, oh my God! That’s that smell! It’s kinda—it smells kind of like a fresh from the garden beet kinda has that earthy flavor to it. Yeah, beets taste like dirt kinda, yeah. So it’s important, the amount of rock dust to biochar is important, so to get it right I use something I call the chicken nugget theory. And that’s like, you don’t want too much of the flour floating around. The biochar is like the nuggets, right, and you don’t want too much of that flour floating around. So you can feel—this feels pretty darn nice, yeah? It’s really well bonded. It’s really a nice blend. And so this blend, because you have that rock powder in there, you’re gonna use this at a lower application rate. It’s gonna be very effective at a pretty low application rate. So this material right here you can use this very sparingly, this would be really good for down the furrow, you know, if you’re planting large acreage or even just in the garden, a little bit sprinkled down the furrow. You could even top dress around your existing plants with this. I really like this mix, it’s one of my favorite blends. I’ve been making this one for only about a year now. The first time I made it, I was just, I love it. I’m really liking this mix. John Kohler: So you guys just learned the five ways to activate your biochar. Of course, I prefer method number four, my own naturally activated biochar. But seriously guys, you guys should use that biochar and one of the other recipes to even make it better. So Josiah, truly, what is the best way to activate your biochar, somebody just wants to do the best, you know, out there, cause you showed them five ways. Which one is really gonna be the best for them? Josiah Hunt: Well the best way is my secret recipe, number six, so secret, top secret. No, you know, I haven’t discovered the best. I try to source regionally, you know, so I have a different set of recipes that I use here in Hawaii than I do for my processing facility in California. And I’ve done work in other places as well and I find the best is what’s local, so source locally with your materials and with your microbes. I find it good to source the materials and the microbes locally and there’s so many different ways you can cook this, you know. There so many different ways you can do it. I heard of some guys in India that are doing very similar stuff with materials and stuff that are very common to come by in India. John Kohler: Right, so this is the great thing, right, you guys don’t have to stick to one of these recipes. If you guys learnt to bake a cake, or the ladies out there learn how to bake a cake, you don’t have to always use the same cake recipe. You just put a little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe gluten free flour if you’re gluten free or you know like a sugar substitute if you can’t eat sugar—same thing with this, basically, you’re just trying to add a few things. You know, a food, a food for the microbes, like the flour, you know, some good nutrients for the microbes and also basically to spread in and get absorbed up the biochar which is the rock powder and of course the microbes are the key to it all. And just use what you got and play around and let it ferment and activate. So Josiah, another thing that’s very important, we showed you guys all these ways to activate biochar, but why should someone take the time to use biochar and activate it in the first place? Is this biochar stuff, is this some newfangled stuff that you’re supposed to buy at your garden center that at most garden centers you can’t even find anyway and it’s this new thing that someone’s just trying to show down your throat and you need to buy it man! Just buy, buy, buy, right? What’s up? Josiah Hunt: Yeah, I get that a lot. I get people looking at me really weird, like, you know, what is this new biochar thing, you know? You got the next snake oil thing for me. And yeah it is pretty new, it’s only about as old as fire and life. You know? It’s only been a part of soil formation since, let’s see, the first lightning bolt hit something living on earth. I don’t know. Not that new. Sorry, that’s me being, you know, sarcastic there. So yeah, biochar is very—it’s an important part of soil formation and soil health. It’s something that has been largely neglected and overlooked or just misunderstood in western agriculture and we’re now rediscovering the importance and the value in this form of organic carbon. It’s a soil organic carbon that we just kinda overlooked and not just kinda overlooked but really really overlooked this one. So it’s an important aspect in the natural farming systems that we’re really starting to chart our pathway through. And we’re really starting to get a better understanding of microbial, the importance of microbes and all the different flavors and they’re doing stuff, I mean, looking at it now, the world of soil microbial science, I love it! It’s just so fascinating! Soil microbes, you know, the rock powders like we were talking about earlier, the humic and falvic acids, and plant associations—certain plants working with each other, and cover cropping and rotating and all of these things are extremely important and I think it’s really important to recognize that soil organic carbon was formerly kind of recognized as this bulk thing and now biochar, biochar is essentially, well, soil organic carbon is a little more than we thought it was. So biochar is basically—and another way I like to say biochar is—it’s a pyrogenic, that means derived from fire, a pyrogenic soil carbon. John Kohler: So in that sense, you know, I get a lot of people saying, “John, I don’t need to add biochar man, I got a lot of carbon in my soil. I compost wood chips, that’s high carbon man!” So that’s not the same stuff, right? We need that stuff too, but we also need the pryogenic carbon. It’s a little bit different. So real quick, Josiah, tell people the difference between the wood chip based carbon and the pyrogenic carbon and the benefits and the differences in it real quick. Josiah Hunt: Okay to try and understand where biochar begins and ends, first of all, biochar was once a glowing ember. Just to think about that, on a molecular level, I mean, it was a wood chip that was once a glowing ember. The hotter stuff was glowing yellow to white even, glowing yellow to white and then cooled off. The molecular structure was forever changed from that point. That’s pyrogenic carbon. That is biochar. John Kohler: How does this act differently in the garden and in the soil and in the web of life? Josiah Hunt: After having gone through that transformation, after it was a wood chip and then a glowing ember and then it cooled off and became this black, very different crispy kind of material, it is no longer so easily biologically degradable. It doesn’t melt like away like a wood chip does, the microbial enzymes don’t break it apart the same way they do a wood chip. And so, it has longevity in soil and during that process, during the firing, the carbon structures that held everything together remained but a lot of the stuff in between is gutted out and you end up with this structure that was designed by the DNA of that plant, you know, it’s an organic living material that has vascular tissue and it’s just amazingly, it’s like a geometric, fractal and 3D or something. It’s amazingly intricate, the design of these. And so when it’s gutted out and all that’s left is that carbon scaffolding, it has extremely high surface area, so extremely high surface area and a long term life cycle in the soil. That’s two of the most important things to recognize about this form of carbon. Extremely high surface area and it lasts for hundreds to thousands of years in the soil. John Kohler: Wow, amazing, I mean, the biochar in my opinion is just one of the very important elements that I teach you guys about gardening. I don’t know any other gardeners that are teaching the stuff I do…visit places on how to activate your biochar, put in rock dust, get some of the best quality bacterial inoculants and make your own bacterial inoculants at home, I mean, cause this is all part of what ancient cultures have been doing for thousands of years. Using nature’s technologies and we’re not creating anything new here, we’re just reinventing the wheel because we’ve been taught this chemical farming mentality and all these things are trying to marginalize when this is what we really need to do to have the highest quality food and activating your biochar, super essential, you gotta do it one of these ways and I know some of you guys still have a problem sourcing your own biochar. I wanna encourage you guys to source your own biochar locally, whenever you can, and also, you know, start making your own biochar. If I haven’t uploaded it that, I will soon have a video on how to buy your own personal biochar maker. Now you know you’re not gonna be able to make heaps and tons for acreage, but if you got some raised beds in your backyard, there’s this little portable biochar maker under $150 that I’ll have a video on real soon where I’m gonna make my own biochar out of my coconut shells that I can’t use for anything else cause they’re so hard and they take forever to compost down. It’s gonna make some amazing biochar for my garden. So source your stuff locally. Now, that being said, if you can’t get any stuff locally and you don’t wanna make it yourself, Josiah has a pre-activated biochar ready for you guys. You don’t have to go through the process of peeing on your biochar, you don’t wanna do that! You can buy some pre-made stuff. So Josiah, tell us about your premade activated biochar here and what we got. Josiah Hunt: Well, this particular mix right here I call the dense mix and this is with the rock powder. So again, this is—it’s a cultured biochar, a biologically activated biochar. And rather than adding just a little bit of food, a little bit of microbes, I added the seasonings. This one is very well seasoned and the seasoning in this one is of a salt rock powder, so all the ingredients for this one are sourced from the same region, from the same basic region in California. And it’s a micro-fine salt rock powder and it’s a forestry based biochar, worm castings, and rice bran. All of that is blended together and then cultured for about two weeks or more and then we can bag it up in bags about a little bit bigger than this, put it in a box, and ship it in the mail to you guys. John Kohler: Yeah I always wanna encourage you guys to source your materials locally, whether that’s rock dust or the biochar. And you know this is not Josiah’s business to be shipping you just one piece at a time of the biochar, but it’s very important to me that, you know, some of this biochar is available to you guys and I really just wanna encourage you guys to make it yourself, you guys learned how to activate it, Josiah shared his recipes with you cause normally Josiah doesn’t deal with home gardeners, shipping off one bag at a time. He wants to make a larger impact in the world and he sells it by container loads, by truck loads, by boatloads to bigger farms so they can get better results, increase their yields, have better soil, more increased microbiology. So Josiah, you wanna put in a word about your company and what you normally do out there to my viewers? Josiah Hunt: Yeah we have two big main processing hubs, one right here on the big island of Hawaii and another one right now in California. And we source local materials and we make awesome products and we try to distribute them to the farming community, the agricultural community, as efficiently as possible. That’s our basic model. John Kohler: Cool so what he’s gonna do for you guys, I got him to do this for you guys, this is like farming quality stuff for you guys that are home gardeners, he’s gonna put as much as he can into a priority flat mail rate box and ship it to you guys anywhere in the United States and I’ll put a link down below to get that special offer with the special GYG discount for you guys. Once again, I wanna encourage you guys to source it locally, make it yourself if you can but if you can’t, you know, he does have this stuff available. And if you guys are a farmer or a farm or a big operation, call him directly to work with him to get this pre-activated biochar directly. Alright Josiah, so any last comments you’d like to share with my viewers today on the subject of the biochar? Josiah Hunt: Yeah, one, real quick before I forget: I try to keep a lot of this information active on my website, so there’s a Pacific Biochar, pacificbiochar.com. So at pacificbiochar.com, I have a post that talks about my biological activation process, how I came up with it, gives out some recipes and gives out the whole basis and understanding. We have current products and a lot of information on there. So that’s a resource for the stuff I don’t have time to talk about right now. One thing I’d like to just really push is that we’re at a point right now where we’re shifting, we’re shifting our understanding of what agriculture is and we’re shifting in our understanding of the human relationship with our planet, with our local systems and with our global systems. I think we’re having a complete paradigm shift in how we interact with this planet that we live on and the organic farming principles and sustainable farming principles, farming with the natural systems of the earth, they hold the future for us. They hold the future for improving the utility of our soils for generations to come and taking that carbon out of the atmosphere and putting in back in the soils where it’s more valuable. Carbon in the atmosphere is a problem right now, carbon in the soils is a valuable, valuable asset. So I just encourage everyone out there to continue watching John’s awesome videos, he’s got some great stuff on organic gardening, and I ask you all to just, if you’ve been burned on biochar, pun intended, it’s not just some hocus pocus thing. It’s a real part of our planet and, really, it’s our understanding of biochar that’s evolving and that needs to evolve and I hope that some of the recipes that we’ve shared with you today will get you amazing results so that you keep on farming and you keep on gardening and you keep on putting awesome, amazing food on the table organically. John Kohler: I mean, I totally agree with Josiah, we need to get back to the organic methods of farming, like the biochar, like the rock dust, like the microbes that I really like to preach to you guys about. I know you’ve heard me say it a million times, but you’ll hear me say it again because it really is that important, you know, the industrial food system, they’re not using the biochar to increase their productivity, they’re using the 10, 10, 10, 7, 7, 7 organic fertilizers if they’re organic and that’s simply putting water-based nutrients and that’s not really building the soil and they’re tilling the soil and destroying the microbes. This is building your soil, not destroying it. We really wanna get into not just sustainable but regenerative agriculture and biochar is really a part of that. So I really hope you guys enjoyed this episode. If you did, please be sure to give me a thumbs up and I’ll be sure to return to visit Josiah the next time I’m on the big island here in Hawaii and take some time out from my vacation to educate you guys because it really is that important to me to teach you guys but also because I’m learning at the same time and, from now on, I’m gonna be peeing on my own biochar and making videos about it! I don’t know about that part…But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out my past episodes, I have over 1,050 episodes now on all aspects of gardening so you can grow the highest quality food in your home so you can feed you and your family and have a higher state of health than the average American out there. Also be sure to subscribe to me for new and upcoming episodes. I travel around more than any other gardener, I’m the most popular Youtube gardener, and you never know where I’m gonna pop up next or what new information you’re gonna learn that’s gonna better your garden as well as your life. So once again, my name is John Kohler with GrowingYourGreens.com, we’ll see you next time and until then, remember: keep on growing!