Jeff Ravage

Hi Antonio, Our media folks aren't quite sophisticated enough to be minting special hashtags, although that sounds great. You can help just by using your social media to link others to this experiment page. Back us for a penny or a pound and you can be on the roll out Zoom where we will go into the design and techniques a lot deeper than we can in the short descriptions we have here.

I believe it's because we have sped ahead of the normal rate of decomposition. So, if we have concluded primary decay 10 times faster than nature, it's going to take time for the secondary stages to catch up. This is one of the things we're looking into. And we're doing it because when we did the first experiments in rapid decay, we discovered our post-rot compost held twice as much carbon as the natural duff. That was when we began scratching our heads and wondering if there could be a benefit we could capitalize on here. Hence this experimental stage. We'll still have to test in the field and verify the stability. But one investigation at a time.

Both compounds become involved in the soil cycle and continue to decay, albeit at much slower rates. Lignin, especially, can linger for decades to centuries. The limit is understood to be the Carbon to Nitrogen ratio. More nitrogen and the faster the carbon can decay. In the Boreal forest lignin lingers and can be up to 40% of the soils organics. In these ecosystems, the amount of carbon stored in the soil can be up to 80% of the carbon in the entire forest. Here, in the Rocky mountains, we generally find the amount of carbon held in soil (or duff, as the case might be) is only about 25%. This soil is already lower in nitrogen, so the end hypothesis is that if we can reduce waste wood form the forest, in place, to create higher lignin soils we can increase the amount of carbon sequestered within. Forests are second only to the oceans in carbon sequestration capacity.