10 letter 19 February

[ridethetalk]

Surely in these days of enhanced climate change the term BIOCHAR is at least rare and I would say common...

[pat]

Not a word I've heard.

[Alan W]

Biochar, according to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, is:

a form of charcoal that is produced by exposing organic waste matter (such as wood chips, crop residue, or manure) to heat in a low-oxygen environment and that is used especially as a soil amendment

The definition in the online Oxford is:

Charcoal produced from plant matter and stored in the soil as a means of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

The first known use of the word was in 1995, but it didn't seem to catch on till around 2007. The word's appearances are often in technical and environmentalist publications, but it can also be seen in news reports. Currently the most recent instance in the News on the Web corpus is from a 4 March article about Fork It Farm, a pig farm, in the Examiner (Launceston, Tasmania):

The second project the farm will undertake with the grant funding is to purchase a biochar kiln to incinerate bones.

And a few days earlier, in the Herald (Scotland):

The Trust is also using innovative methods such as retorn kilns which will process rhododendron waste into biochar which can be returned to the soil -- helping foe become friend.

I'll add biochar as a rare word.

[yelnats]

Biochar was used in the Amazon on low fertility soils and the resulting soil is known in Portuguese as Terra preta.

Wikipedia says "Terra preta owes its characteristic black color to its weathered charcoal content, and was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, broken pottery, compost and manure to the low fertility Amazonian soil. A product of indigenous soil management and slash-and-char agriculture, the charcoal is stable and remains in the soil for thousands of years, binding and retaining minerals and nutrients."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

[ridethetalk]

Thanks Alan