A Perspective on Terra Preta and Biochar
The Modern Discovery of Terra Preta, and a Brief Modern History of Biochar In the Amazon Basin, there exists thousands of hectares of cultivated plots consisting of unusually fertile black soil, termed Terra Preta de Indio — “dark earth of the Indians” — called Terra Preta for short. These soils are many hundreds if not thousands of years old, and have remained remarkably fertile in spite of the tropical rainfall, which accelerates the weathering of soil and the leaching of water soluble nutrients. Modern scientific interest in this material began with a Dutch scientist named Wim Sombroek, whose book Amazon Soils, published in 1966, began the……