Rice planting experiment with charcoal enriched soil

Apparantly, the charcoal works best when left and moistened for a few months to allow bacteria to colonize it. Im going to try it at home some time with a controlled indoor grow.

Please check the SRI method.
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journey to forever how to help rice plants

Also, significantly higher amounts of charcoal may improve performance.
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Uses of Rice Husk Charcoal for Container Culture Mie University

Biochar will save the world!

carbon

"This is a very ancient way of planting and harvesting rice..the Philippine government should invest and help farmers get technical assistance, the use of scientific method such as control flooding of the levees, machineries- using automatic planters which the Japanese have and combined harvester machines.

Being the world's number one rice importing country and one of the fastest growing population, the agricultural sector is essential particularly in rice cultivation and should be addressed.

It took repeated charring over hundreds of years to create the black gold soil of the Amazon

Yes, when the soil is already very fertile the biochar does not help so much. Actually we have new experiments ongoing, with hybrid seeds (TH-82), biochar, compost, underplowed stalks, no commercial fertilizer. In about 2 weeks its harvest and it looks very promissing so far.

At our vegetable experiments the soil mixture of biochar, ashes, dung and compost generated some sensational results and at present we are already in the commercial stage.

I suspect that you haven't really gained much benefit from the char as the quantities in your soil are so small. As I understand it the char isn't really a fertilizer, more a substrate, an the true amazonian terra preta soils have MUCH higher densities of char than you have used.

The real benefit will come over years as local farmers create their own biochar from the farming wastes. You don't show what happens to the rice stalks after threshing but they would be prime for making biochar

We had made another experiment at the same experimental field, added again the same amount of biochar and compost, but the harvest was heavily damaged by rain and overflooding. So we do not have proper results. Next planting is in December, harvest in April. My next Philippine trip is from January 16 to June 5, then more experiments will be made, especially with sugarcane, corn and vegetables.