One concept which should be on the radar of Obama's new agriculture and technology directors is biochar. Scientists are studying the impact its potential for agriculture and combatting global warming. I've seen a few mentions of it over the last half year, but anything with the potential to help with our problems in both global warming and soil fertility should be getting more attention and funding than it seems to be generating.
Science Daily has a small vein of articles about it, the concept of adding charcoal to soil to improve it's fertility. I had previously read about biochar in a really good National Geographic article about soil, Our Good Earth, where the author uses the term "terra preta" (black earth). Basically, the concept comes from patches of human-made dark fertile soil in the Amazon, where fertile soil is supposedly impossible to create. Hundreds of years ago, people added tons of charcoal to the soil, in some places up to six feet deep, and the soil is still fertile today, in the same conditions where modern agriculture struggles to keep the soil fertile for five years.
Soil scientists are now making their own terra preta and studying it. Apparently, the charcoal binds with nutrients to keep them from washing away and it creates air pockets for beneficial microbes; the soil becomes loose and friable and full of all the stuff that plants like. And because charcoal doesn't decompose like compost, it's a permanent soil amendment, or better than a soil amendment, really, a soil catalyst. It changes the structure of the soil, and the soil then amends itself.
It doesn't seem like a particularly new concept--I learned about slash-and-burn agriculture in fourth or fifth grade, and I think it's been practiced all over the world for thousands of years--but apparently it's a question of scale and technique. Slash-and-burn leaves the charcoal/ash on, or near, the surface; it creates good soil for a few years but then the top layer washes away and leaves the soil ruined. Biochar adds larger quantities--descriptions of six-foot deep terra preta make it sound like ancient Amazonians trucked the stuff in from Pennsylvania--and it mixes the charcoal deeper into the soil. Biochar is like french-intensive gardening, when everyone else has just been top-dressing.
So, hopefully this can get some more attention, see if it really has potential to work in commercial food production outside of the Amazon. Soil fertility is a huge deal in the world; it's one of the many natural resources we're wasting at a dangerous rate. Improving the soil of the United States on a massive scale, if possible, is the type of thing that the new Obama economic stimulus should be geared towards. Also, some people think that we could use the technique to sequester carbon in the soil. Today's article said it worked great, though another said the biochar's bacterial growth spike released carbon out of the soil that counterbalanced the carbon put into the soil, leaving almost no net gain. My own thought is that someone should be able to someday figure out a way to capture carbon released from coal-burning plants and use that to make a product for agricultural soil. I'm always attracted to the idea of using bi-products, and carbon is one of the major bi-products of our time. It would be great if it could be used for something other than warming our climate. I can picture them selling charcoal briquets at the garden centers.