▶ Biochar and Manure in the Central Sands of Wisconsin

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Great.

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Thanks for having me.

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So my name is Brendan Baird.

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I’m a second year Master’s student in Dr. Natasha Rayne’s soil fertility and nutrient cycling lab in the department of soil and environmental sciences at UW–Madison.

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And today we’re talking about biochar and manure in the central sands and our experiences with that.

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So to start off, I would just like to pose this research question that we have been talking about is how does the addition of biochar to manure affect nitrogen availability for the subsequent crop.

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And here I have the table from our A2809, our nutrient guidelines and, and this is our estimated nutrient availability for various manures.

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And I would just like to point out that this is something we old very highly in our lab and we probably referenced this a lot.

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But one thing here that I have highlighted is that there’s a lot of variance in everything that we have for our nutrient availability across all manures and across all of our times to incorporation.

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So this is something that we are really looking at and our research.

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So for our biochar and manure today I’m going to first off be talking about what biochar is, where is it best used, what soils might we find the best response from other studies that have looked at biochar and biochar manure.

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And then I’ll finish off with their own experience and especially in Hancock.

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So first off, what is biochar? Biochar is a general term is bio as in life and char as in charcoal.

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Biochar actually isn’t just charcoal, It’s actually produced differently and has lot a lot different properties than charcoal.

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But it is kind of deemed as the a great soil health additive that can retain nutrients that can retain water in our soils.

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And it is something that is being dubbed as great for the environment because of its carbon retention capabilities in our soil.

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A more technical definition that I have here is that it is the solid material obtained from the thermochemical conversion of biomass and oxygen limited environment.

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Now this seems very boring and lots of large words that don’t really mean much to a lot of people, but we can break it down and we can look at how biochar is produced and we can kind of make sense of what those mean.

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So first, biochar can be created from lots of different things.

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Now these come from that, that first breakaway from bio, the life of what biochar is.

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We see that we have agricultural products, byproducts, mostly wastes that are used in the production of biochar.

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So we have our our straw, our rice husks, our manures and our litters.

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Those can all be dried down and created in the biochar must have our own waste, our wastewater sludge which can be created in the biochar.

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Algaes can be created in the biochar.

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And then we also have hardwoods, which would probably be what most people would think of when they think of a charcoal based substance.

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And that is probably what most biochar is made out of today.

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And so we need to produce this biotchar somehow and it’s produced in kilns and there’s tons of different ways that we can produce it in these different kilns.

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The picture on the left is more of a backyard kind of “roughing it” kiln that we see here.

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You know, there’s not much that we can do to control everything in this kiln and it gives us different properties of our biochar.

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Really the only thing that we can control in this environment is what we put into the kiln and how much oxygen we let into that kiln.

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The oxygen and the temperature at which we cook our biochar really regulates the properties such as the surface area and the surface area and the amount of nutrients that the biochar is able to hold.

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On the right we have a more industrial style kiln and this is where we can really fine tune all of our all of our different parameters that we want.

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When we produce our biochar in here, we can really control the temperature and we can control how much oxygen is being let into the environment and we can control how quickly we cool it down at the end and how much heat we want in that throughout the entire process.

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So these two methods are drastically different in cost.

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One you can probably do relatively cheap and save a lot of money, and the other, you know, most people are never going to get to this point.

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It’s going to be more industrial settings and probably not on farms.

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So the main take away I have from this here is that we can start small and we can experiment with biochar and then get to a point where if we know that it’s right for our right for our production, we can we can contract out and get a larger, we can get larger companies to produce nicer biochar for us.

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So next we’re going to be talking about where biochar is best used or where we might find a higher response from our biochar.

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And these soils are coarse soils, acidic soils, and soils that are prone to leaching.

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So, you know, our coarse soils in Wisconsin are antisols and are insecticides.

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And you know, that might not mean much to a lot of people, but these are, are sandy soils, our younger soils, soils that are not fine particles.

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They they’re prone to leaching much more than you know, are fine, siltier clay soils.

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And this is where we can see that biochar with its water and nutrient retaining capabilities, providing the best, the best attributes to our soil.

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And it’s also dubbed as being good in acidic soils in Wisconsin.

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These are spodosols and we can think of these as our forested soils

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in more northern Wisconsin and you do have a patch there

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in central Wisconsin.

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Biochar does have a slight liming effect.

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However, I would not attribute it equally to ag lime.

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However, it does help with our pH in our soils.

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So now we’ll jump into other works that we’ve looked at.

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We’re primarily looking at our our yield effects, nitrate leaching, and our nitrogen use efficiency.

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These are three topics that we are looking at in our research.

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So these are things that we have pulled apart from other papers.

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Excuse me.

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So to start we have a couple sources on yield effects and biochar.

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This is a study from the University of Ohio and the University of Michigan looking at a two year corn soy rotation with biochar additions to the soil.

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This only had two different treatments, control and a biochar addition.

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Here we see that in our first year with our corn rotation, we saw no difference, no statistical difference in our yields.

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We might see that one site had slightly higher control, one site had a slightly higher biochar yield response, but really there’s not a lot of difference between them.

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However, when we jumped to year 2 with our soybean rotation, we did a significant increase in yield with our biochar addition at one location.

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Again, the other two locations did not have a significant difference, however, they did trend slightly higher.

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This paper really referenced meta analyses that show that crop yield should be enhanced from day one should have about a 15% increase in yield when biochar is added to these soils.

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However, that meta analysis also said that it depends on the environment and you know, that can be said about a lot of things that we do.

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But if everything, if all the cards fall right, we should be seeing these increased yields.

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This paper also said that the one main thing that they wish they could have done was have a more than two year study on this and that is a common theme across all of these papers and lots of biochar work in general is that a long term, you know, 5 to 10 year long studies are wanted to be done.

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The next paper, which is also a yield effect paper, looks at a control which is, you know, using fertilizer as usual.

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And then we have a decrease in fertilizer, which is our eye there.

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And then we have that decreased fertilizer use with manure added.

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We have our decreased fertilizer use with biochar added and our decreased fertilizer use with manure and biochar added.

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So I’m just going across from left to right here.

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We can see that when we decrease our fertilizer use, obviously our yields decrease.

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But when we add manure to our decreased fertilizer, we do see a significant jump from our control.

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However, our 2 bars in the right there are statistically significant to each other and they show us that biochar and manure and our inorganic fertil, our decreased inorganic fertilizer gave us the highest yield, but it’s also matches our decreased fertilizer with biochar.

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So all in all, combining biochar and manure may help to maintain our yields while we are reducing our fertilizer inputs.

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Next, we’re going to be jumping into nitrate leaching.

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This was a column study done in the lab that compares a like a bare soil to a biochar treated soil.

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We had two biochar percentages here, 1% biotchar add to that soil and a 5% biotchar add to the soil.

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And this study looks at adding fertilizers at week 1 and week 5 and then producing simulated rainfall events each week to give a leachate at the bottom of each column.

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It’s a one thing that I would like to point out here is that our 5% biochar really, really contains that nitrate in the soil in comparison to not only the control but also our 1% of biochar.

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You see a week 5 when the second application of fertilizer was added that it doesn’t really look like the 5% of biochar had much difference between weeks 5, 6, 7 and 8.

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It kind of hit its plateau there and it’s retaining that nitrate in the soil.

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So biochar here really significant significantly reduced the the leaching in comparison to our control.

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And then it also provided the leaching control throughout the entire eight week study.

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And our final paper that we’re going to be talking about references nitrogen use efficiency with biochar and green manures.

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So in this study, they compared control, various green manures, fertilizers and biochar to see what percent of nitrogen, what nitrogen use efficiency percentage came from each, each came from each, each treatment.

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Sorry.

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As we can see our VF treatment here is a green manure that was incorporated into the soil.

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We had about a 60% nitrogen use efficiency rate compared to our fertilizer rate to the right there which had about 45% nitrogen use efficiency.

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And when we add biochar to both of those, we see a huge shoot up into 90 and 80% in between there of nitrogen use efficiency when we add that biochar.

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And now something that could be said is, you know, our biochar does contain minimal amounts of nitrogen.

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However, that nitrogen is largely contained in organic matter in that biochar.

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So it doesn’t really affect our nitrogen use efficiency in the sense this is all from the absorbing capabilities of that biochar for holding on to those nutrients and water in providing that huge boost in nitrogen use efficiency between the green manure and the fertilizer.

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All right.

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Now that we’ve talked about some other studies that looked at biochar and manure, we can talk about our experiences in Hancock in the central sands with biochar and manure.

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So first, our rationale behind the study is that literature does not often reference nitrogen recovery from manure when it is applied with biochar, and we’d like to figure out how to increase profitability by increasing this nitrogen recovery and reducing nitrogen loss.

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So some of our objectives from the study were to evaluate our biochar manure effects on corn growth, nitrogen uptake and yield, how to assess increasing biochar rates and its effects, nitrogen effectiveness from that manure and then comparing yield and nitrogen use efficiency between manure and urea.

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So jumping into this, I would just like to start with our experimental design.

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We had 9 different treatments with a control, 3 different treatments with biochar or 3 different treatments with manure added, 2 of those with biochar.

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In this study we only added biochar and manure and mixed those together.

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We did not add our biochar with our synthetic fertilizer.

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We had rates of 2 1/2 tons of biochar, 5 tons of biochar and then 10,000 gallons of manure were added to those plots.

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And then alongside with our biochar manure, we decided to do a nitrogen rate study using urea.

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And those are our treatments 5 through 9.

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And this picture on the right here is an overhead view that we took with our drone of our field about midway through July, I think.

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And I really like this picture because it shows, you know, which plots, you know, are, are greener and which plots are more yellow.

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And it just looking at it myself, I, I know which, which plots are which and it’s really intriguing.

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So from there we’ll jump to our application methods.

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This picture was our, our biochar that we saw at the beginning.

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This is a hardwood biochar that we got from Davey Tree, which is a biochar company down in Illinois.

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And then we also use liquid dairy manure as our manure amendment.

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This was located from a a dairy nearby the Hancock Research Station.

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From there, after we gathered our our supplies, we weighed out our biochar prior to applying it to the field and then we just spread it out by hand.

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And then we got our manure into some totes on the back of a flat rack, and we applied it using gravity and a hose.

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This was fun, especially because you know, when you ask people to come help you spread manure, you kind of expect that they’d come prepared.

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But I was the only one with rubber boots that day, so I was the one trudging around in the manure and biochar, spreading everything.

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But it was fun, and I really wouldn’t change it.

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So that’s how we applied everything. After this, after we applied our manure biochar, everything was disked in 72 hours after.

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And then following the disking of our fields, we added or they planted everything.

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And then we applied our synthetic urea nitrogen split applied around V5 and then V8 through V10.

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Those are the only nutrient amendments relating to nitrogen that we applied throughout the year.

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We’re just like to point out that no synthetic nitrogen was added at all to our manure and biochar plots.

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So as the year went on, we harvested everything and we got our results.

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So right here is our results from our manure treatments in the study.

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These treatments, they show about a 20 bushel difference between the no biochar added and our 5 tons of biochar with manure. They weren’t statistically different.

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However, I would say 20 bushel difference,

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You know, is quite a lot.

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And then when you look at our results from our, our urea study, we can see that there’s, you know, quite a plateau at the top once we get our high rates of urea added.

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There are statistical differences here.

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You know our three highest rates of urea nitrogen added were all the about the same.

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Again, a 20 bushel difference, but statistics say they are at the same.

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However, when we look at our 100 lbs of nitrogen added, that is about the same as all of our manure treatments.

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So we compare them side by side.

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We can see that you know those those are at about the same and we actually did see increased yield from our 5 tons of biochar manure over that 100 lbs of nitrogen per acre from the area.

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So that’s our comparison there.

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And then we also wanted to look at our nitrate leaching.

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This was something that we thought would look a lot different.

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This is what we have.

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We can see that our, our biochar and manure treatments, you know the trend is that there’s more nitrogen or nitrate in the soil.

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It is retained and not reached out in comparison to our urea and our no biochar manure.

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However, these levels are also low that it just there really wasn’t a difference between everything.

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And again, I would like to point out that this is the first year of our study and that we’re hoping that something looks different and year 2, which we are currently underway.

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So just to recap what our findings we have that manure and biochar did not reach the high yields of our synthetic fertilizer applications.

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Manure and biocharge yields are similar to 100 lbs of synthetic nitrogen yields, and then our soil nitrate levels trended higher in our biochar and manure applications to our other treatments.

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However, we can’t really make any assumptions on that yet.

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One thing that I didn’t reference at the end was our our nitrogen use efficiency which we talked about in the beginning in the middle there. It’s something we’re still working on gathering data for.

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But our future work in our directions that we’re looking at is our multi year results of applying manure over the existing biochar field and not reapplying any biochar.

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And that is what we are currently in the midst of.

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We’re going to be harvesting here soon and hopefully we’ll have data from year two.

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And something else that we thought would be interesting is increasing our rates of application and or introduce different nutrient applications or biochar feedstock types into our system.

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And then something that, you know, we’re not equipped with right now, but studying a long term study, you know, at the 5 to 10 year study like I mentioned earlier.

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And then going back to our nitrate leaching, this picture that I have here is a column study that we’re doing in the lab that’s looking at nitrogen transformations and translocations in the soil.

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And leaching and mobilization and minimization.

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And that’s what we’re going to be undertaking here over the winter.

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So with that, I would be happy to take a couple questions.

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I do have to get going here in a couple minutes, but if you have any questions, this is my contact information and I would love to talk with anybody in the future.

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Do you think differences in nitrate leaching using biochar might be more defined at lower end rates?

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That’s a great question.

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Yeah.

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I don’t know at the top of my head, but I’d really like to look into that and you know, understand if we do see it, you know, leaching properties with lower rates of nitrogen.

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Yeah.

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Thanks for that.