 Welcome to Inventing Our Future on Thief Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Brittany Zimmerman. And I'm your co-host, Richard Hall. Today, we are going to do a deep dive into dirt. So joining us, we have two guests. We have Mike, Vaughn, Vaughn Stock, and John Webster. Welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you, Brittany and Richard. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, Mike, you know, Brittany and I last week, we visited some mulch and compost operations. It was a mind-blowing experience for me, I got to tell you. So, but anyway, I just wanted to introduce you. Go ahead and tell us about yourself and what you do. I work at the US Indo-Pacific Command, Office of Science Technology. And what we do is look at technologies and how technologies can improve the preparedness and readiness of our war fighters and also the community in which we operate and live. And one of my portfolios is environment and sustainment. So my background is I'm a retired officer in the army that also worked for over 30 years now with the Batello Memorial Institute out of Columbus. I'm secunded from there to support the Indo-Pacific Command since 2011. And my graduate work was on industrial scale composting and ex situ soil remediation using bioprocessing. So developed a high rate in vessel composting for optimizing the economics and quality of compost and then applied compost technology to remediate explosives contaminated soil and also hydrocarbon contaminated soil. And how do we do that cost effectively and environmentally friendly manner. And did a lot of compost research at Ohio State University, my master's and PhD. Thank you, Mike. I think you probably know a thing or two about soils and dirt then. So. Yeah, and the difference between the two. Exactly. Awesome and welcome, John. I'm excited to have you with us. Also, could you give us a brief introduction and background of yourself? Yeah, sure thing. Happy to you. It's glad to be here with a heavy hitter, Mike. Nice to meet you and Richard, good to see you again. Thank you, Brittany. My name's John Webster. I'm with the US Biachart Initiative. I am the director of communications. I also am a biochar producer. I have a facility in Salt Lake City, Utah that I've been operating for just about two and a half years now. I was previously in the tech sector and then moved into the environmental space and I found that quite an itch with biochar. So the US Biachart Initiative is committed to advancing the sustainable use and production of biochar through science, implementation, studies, practices. And now we're working on communications without outreach and education. So I'm really pleased to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Awesome. Thank you so much, John. We're really happy to have you here also. So just taking it at a super high level and then drilling ourselves down. Maybe Mike, you kind of queued us up. What is the difference between soil and dirt? Well, so dirt is mainly the dust and the inorganic material that is found around on it. It's not the whole matrix of soil. So just the dust you see, the soil, the inorganic material, silicates, et cetera, that are in the soil and the topsoil but they're not the soil. The soil itself is a whole ecosystem. It's a three-phase ecosystem that consists of minerals, the geologic mineral mineralogy, the dust of which becomes the dirt or then inclusive of that is the whole bio mass, the bacteria and the fungi, even the microorganisms and even the small insects that are in the soil and all that is matrix with a humic material that is organic matter, which is about two to 3% of the soil, but it's very important because it provides a lot of opportunity for plants to hold in nutrients to a roots to find security for bacteria to be healthy and for healthy bacteria, fungi, actinomyocetes to out-compete plant pathogens. So that's kind of a short run down. And don't forget the water, the moisture and the gases that are in the soil matrix as well. Awesome, thank you. Okay, so now we understand a little bit of a difference in our vocabulary right between soil and dirt. We've seen a lot, I would say recently in terms of discussions around fertilizers, soil amendment products and things along those lines. Is soil amendment something that's been done in all of human history? Is this something rather new? What's kind of the climate of amending soil and how has that changed over time? I'm happy to jump on that a little bit. I mean, the plow was invented just a little over 2,000 years ago. So, and since then we've been farming soil carbon, right? So, and then with that, we've had a number of soil health practices that include things like agricultural charcoal, there are some cultures that utilize charcoal and there's evidence of nine different indigenous groups utilizing charcoal or biochars we're calling it these days for growing healthier crops and controlling their environment a little bit more responsibly, you know? Growing food makes for a more organized civilization. With the invention of new technologies, we've got a way to create this charcoal in a more sensible manner. I guess in terms of the history of addendum, you know, manure has been our number one input as we've domesticated animals. We incorporate that in their manures into our soils in order to grow healthier crops. That means we're doing a number of things, right? We're farming the microbes that come from the intestines of the animals and then we're also utilizing the organic material that they started to break down for us. Wonderful, so if we have all these new ways of doing soil amendments, does that mean, is it fair to say or is it true? Has soils over, you know, the last thousand, 2000 years, are they getting healthier or are they becoming more depleted? So I'll jump on that. So with the advent of artificial chemical fertilizers and industrial scale farming, there was a, you know, the miracle revolution to feed the world of the 20th century was truly a miracle and being able to help provide food for billions of people. But the sufferer was soil. Soil suffered because chemical fertilizers were applied. We had a monoculture of crops, monocrop of mentality and that robbed the soil of the organic matter and the biggest result of that was a dust bowl in the 1930s as, you know, people know and saw in history. So people started learning. We started USDA, the US Department of Agriculture started extension centers to say, hey, we should, you know, rotate crops and they started doing that and we started minimizing things. We started doing things better but we still relied heavily on chemical fertilizers and it didn't really regrow the organic matter. So one thing that compost you can do is really provide a lot of good organic matter back to the soil to promote that healthy ecosystem for plant between plants and microbes and nematodes, et cetera. So, you know, we really didn't improve our soil through the 20th century miracle of farming and farming techniques, but we learned lessons and are working things like no-till using organic farming, et cetera, to recover and being able to have high intensity farming at the same time try to preserve our top soil. So erosion is a big thing too. So go watch that. Yeah, and it's been nice to see the move into the regenerative agriculture space with the conservation tillage that you were talking about and incorporating sound practices, water management, animal management on some of the land. I do think one of the more interesting things is how now that we've come to realize that the tillage exposes all that carbon to volatize and go up into our atmosphere that we're paying attention to that and we're taking the time to focus on rebuilding those stores. Effectively, we've kind of, we wrote a lot of checks on that bank account and we've somewhat depleted it. A lot of other soils throughout the United States are in frankly, they're in desperate condition. So I've been extremely pleased to see the actions that the USDA and RCS are taking in order to rebuild the soil carbon through sensible programs like the Code 336, which literally will pay farmers to install materials like compost, mulch, and biochar into their soils. Not only does it pay for the material, it also pays for the installation and some transport for it. So we do have a really nice, strong focus on rebuilding the soil store, the soil carbon, building up that biology and bringing crop productivity back to a less input for more yield mentality. So it's pretty exciting. If we're using a compost mulching and those things to get the soil in better shape, are we, is that making a difference immediately with a last for any length of time? How much do we have to do it? Are we that far behind? Or I'm just wondering how much effort is it gonna take for us to get in better shape than we are? So Mike, so the deficit has to be paid back. So you have to build up the organic matter and apply heavier applications. And the thing about compost versus a chemical fertilizer is you don't have to worry about the runoff. So, or even raw manure, when you apply raw manure, like a chicken manure, a hog manure, you have to be careful about your NPK loading because if you overload in phosphates and potassium, that runs into the watershed and it creates secondary bad problems for your water quality. So you have to manage your nutrient load and applying a compost material and compost in combination with a biochar will prevent that overloading and at the same time provide you some residual NPK and the organic mineral buildup. And then in successive years, you can cut back. And then if you didn't have an annual or even a bi-annual or semi-annual, excuse me, semi-annual maintenance application that the farmers would apply and the tonnage per acre of material to add is a function of the soil type, the level of depletion, this experience, and even the crops that you wanna grow. But the general application would be the same thing, make up and then sustain over. Yeah. And Richard, I have a little bit of information for you there. I've worked with some landowners they started out a number of years ago when you were talking about land management and you were talking about a chemical program, right? The soil health managers, they were telling you they were advising you, here's the inputs you need, here's your chemicals, here's when to apply something that ends in a side, pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer. And nowadays, again, with the conservation practices, the low till or no till practices we're not releasing the carbon so quickly. And so like Mike pointed out, as you manage your nutrition, you include your things like compost and your no till practices, we are seeing soil carbon reserves build rather quickly. Somebody I worked with a little bit down South here in Utah where I'm located, just a little over five years ago, their soil carbon content was sitting just under 2%. Five years later, no till, careful management and they're now sitting at 4.5%. So that's a fairly quick, in geologic timescale so it's amazingly fast, right? We didn't think that was really possible. We didn't have the knowledge that we have now. In the past, we're like, oh, it's gonna take 1,000 years to build 1% of soil carbon. We now know that that's not true. Responsible sane practices build carbon in a quick manner. And that's why people are so interested in this field. One of the things I do wanna point out is that when we're talking about loading of those nutrients, the benefit that biochar has, and I'm gonna show real quick on the screen, this is what the porosity looks like for the biochar. You can see it looks a lot like a petrified sponge. Well, all those little nooks and crannies are high-rise condos for all the beneficial microbes and bacteria that Mike was talking about earlier. And the other thing that it has is it has an attraction. So as a lot of our materials are coming in and they tend to be positively charged ions, so we have the cation ion exchange and anions. But anyways, these inputs come in, including water. They form a temporary bond in most cases. So when they meet that biochar, they stick there for a period of time. And what's nice is when you have that in the soil subsurface, that means you have a longer duration value for your water, a longer duration value for your NPK, whether it's an organic source or even a synthetic source. So the longer we can hold on to those nutrients, the longer we can provide a beneficial environment, the more chance we give to that biology in the soil to survive and thrive and do what they do. It's literally their bodies and their outputs that are building the soil aggregates. It's really a dynamic and beautiful environment down there. I mean, if you're a good gardener, you're an amazing microbrancher. That's a simple truth. If those Mike also expand on the cation exchange capacity, that's a really important factor to consider with respect to nutrient retention. So if you apply strict chemical fertilizer, and certainly there's a place for chemical fertilizer, it's just important. But if you apply strict chemical fertilizer in this just into the regular soil, like a clay soil, most of it washes away and the phosphate stick because it doesn't travel very far and absorbs, but it holds tightly to the soil, doesn't release. If it hits a biochar, then you have more of a cation exchange capacity. So the facilitation of an equilibrium dynamic of the phosphate being able to be absorbed by the plants is better. So two benefits are, one, you don't need as much chemical fertilizer, and two, you don't wash away as much. So it's a two for one win, it's actually a three for one win because it also creates that healthy dynamic that John was mentioning. So compost has a similar benefit of cation exchange capacity, it's a different mechanism, it's more organic matrix. And one of the highlights I wanna mention about compost is that if you wanna do composting in your backyard, there's basic phases, there's an additional lag, first you wanna balance out your carbon nitrogen ratio, get your moisture content about 50% or so. And then it takes a little bit of a lag time, then the temperature builds up as the microbes start working up the, or get degradable materials, hit the exothermic phase and rapidly will elevate in temperature. And then once those readily dynamic, readily absorbed, degradable materials are consumed by the bacteria, it'll level off in temperature, and then you enter your curing phase. So you go from a high rate bacterial phase to a steady lower rate of mineralization and humification through the actinomyces and fungi. So that's, I just wanted to highlight that for the backyard gardeners that wanna know about composting. So you need to be able to have a way of getting the higher temperature and then letting it cure out. And then once it cures out and the oxygen use rate goes down, you start building that humid fraction, now you're getting a mature compost. And that mature compost is a good compost that you wanna apply in your yard and your container media. Yes, absolutely. And if you'll allow me, one of the things I wanna point out is that when you add a material like biochar to your compost, you reduce a lot of the valorization. So instead of having your nutrients go up into the atmosphere or CO2, they retain in the compost pile. The other thing is that biochar is this beautiful black color. So you can see here, I'm holding it up on the screen. It's dark, just like the charcoal that you're used to in some of your fire pits. That color in your composting can help accelerate the process. Plus the build also increases the microbial communities as well. So there are studies that show that adding as little as 10% by volume compost or biochar to your compost pile can accelerate the maturation process by as much as 20%. It increases the amount of sun energy that's captured, reduces the nutrient loss and improves the overall microbial community. So it's really kind of a win-win for the organic recycling and composting community. And it provides a porosity for the air exchange, a good porosity value for healthy compost is about 40%. And a lot of times in industrial composting that are static pile or windrow driven, you had a bulking agent like wood chips. Well, wood chips, they'll stay very high lignin, they'll stay in there. So for container media, you have to separate that out. But if you have a biochar, you can just incorporate that, blend it in and it's part of your container media as a healthy matrix. Yeah, it also keeps the odors down, which is the neighbors really appreciate that. And there's something about it when you get that rich, dark earth and the compost and the biochar together and you put it in your hands. Oh man, there's nothing like it. And when you see what it does for your plants, it's really amazing. Smells like you're in the woods. Oh, isn't that great? Really is. You know, I've got a question. Out here on the Hummelcork coast, there's a bunch of sweet potatoes being grown. So they kill the soil and they plant it and then they harvest and they let it rest for a while. Then they plow all the regrow weeds and whatever grows up back into the soil. Is it possible for them to accelerate that process using compost and biochar to make that period shorter so that they can rotate the crop faster? It's configurable, right? You have a lot of options between both the biochar and the compost. It depends on what your resource concerns are. Are you addressing the biology or are you addressing water holding capacity? Are you addressing something else? It, again, it just takes a little know-how and time in order to put things together, build a solutable program. The NRCS is there to help you along the way for a lot of your growers. Mike, I'm afraid I may have cut you off. Did you have something you wanted to say about that? I was just going to say that if you do things you could do, depending on how the top or the residual step or organic material, the leaves or whatever, you can either, if you harvest the dose and compost the dose, you could within short order put that right back in as an immature compound. You could really, it depends how easily you could recover all the green material, put it into a in-vessel system, and I could turn it around and like within a week put it back on as a raw compost and that could really accelerate your crop turn. That's one option. The other option is you could blend in some biochar with some mature compost and that'll give you some acceleration. So Richard, it sounds like it can work. It's just an issue of maybe giving it a little trial. So if you've got a few hundred acres that you're farming, maybe try this on five to 10 acres and see what hits the best for you on your production. I was going to say, time is money, huh? Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it is. And water and honestly, water is money and fertilizer is money and compost is money and biochar is money. So when we can figure out how to get them all to work together and optimize the performance then that's really fantastic. One thing I wanted to highlight just off of that and Richard's last question is high intensity, right? So in the island nations food, getting food to an island, getting more food you can grow yourselves the more sustainable resilient you become and limited acreage you want to be able to have more crop turn or greenhouse production. So using biochar compost in tandem could really help you get that higher intensity, higher yield dynamic going for your agriculture, local agriculture. So what I'm hearing a lot of right is how the interactions are occurring between compost and mulch and biochar. Now, I think one of the things we hear about is, oh, should I apply compost or should I apply mulch or should I apply biochar? What I think you guys are here to say is that, that those things are not in competition with one another but they're actually synergistic. So it's a combination of all of these things working together that really highlights the best version of our soils. Am I understanding that correct? I believe so. Yes, but I'd also like to highlight that an unscreened compost can make a really good top dressing instead of a mulch because you don't have to rake it off after. It absorbs in the soil over time and still provides you that top cover you need to suppress some of the weeds growing in but it won't rob the sort of nitrogen like a mulch will. Right, and then for something like biochar you don't want to put that on top. We want to get that down into the rhizosphere where the roots are, we want it down in here. So if we were going to practice that young compost as a mulch practice we'd put a layer of biochar down first and then that way the biochar gets all power packed with those nutrients as they work their way through. And then as the biochar itself works its way down into the soil layers then it's kind of again, it's a win-win. And again, it is all about addressing the resource concern so working with your certified crop assistance is always a good idea. Your local agronomist should be able to give you some input as well. Biochar is the new kid on the block. So there have been some studies going on on the islands for a number of years now. But again, not everybody knows about it. It is extremely well studied with the science just like compost is. It just doesn't have the popular adoption. And it still frankly is a little bit of a price point. We are seeing more producers come online. So as that's been coming online we're seeing the price go down for purchasing the biochar and it's increasing adoption over also. It's a very exciting way to bring balance. Both biochar and compost can also have another benefit and that is to extend the life of landfills. The landfills of a purpose but putting organic material into landfills is not a great idea because they're high volume, low weight and also create a lot of methane problems down the line. So if we could source, separate, divert organic materials out of the landfill into composting and the same producing biochar that'll have economic benefits and environmental benefits. It's a wonderful virtuous cycle. We're also finding the biochar incorporation into animal management practices besides greatly reducing the odor is also reducing a lot of the methane output. So methane is a little bit more of a concern than CO2. CO2 we sure have a lot of but again, it's all about finding balance and that I really am happy you brought up that restoration. Wonderful, yeah. I wanna say thank you first and foremost. I'm really excited about diving deeper in. I think in some of our upcoming letters we'll do a super deep dive into both composts, mulches, biochars and other soil management practices. So I wanted to say thank you guys for giving us that 50,000 foot view of how these things start coming together and we really appreciate that. So as we wrap up, was there any last informative bits Mike or John that you'd like to throw at us before we sign off? No, I just might just thinking that there's opportunities for expanding the application of both backyard and industrial commercial scale composting in the islands and look to see how we could collaborate and make that happen. Yeah, and I would like to add that biochar is ancient earth wisdom. We're just, the good news is we have a way to do it with much lower emissions these days. We can really control the type of biochar that you're gonna get, making it suitable for purpose. It's a tremendous opportunity to reduce greenhouse gases, grow big crops with less inputs. And one last request would be that you go to our website if possible at biochar-us.org and sign up for our newsletter. We've got a monthly newsletter that contains a lot of very useful information about biochar and the latest news. So, and Brittany and Richard, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you guys. Oh man, all right. This is, I'm all excited about this. A lot of fun. A lot of fun. Thank you guys. Yeah, get out there and garden. Absolutely. All right, wrapping up then. This is inventing our future in Taukaua'i. I want to thank you again, Mike and Jad, for joining us and thanks, of course, to our viewers for watching. If you want to get our email advisories or to see a complete listing of all of the shows, you can sign up for them on thinktechkaua'i.com. But we will be back in two weeks, so please tune in and we will do a deep dive into our e-invention. Until then, I'm Brittany Zemecki. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo.