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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but why is this better than leaving the biomass in the field and perhaps doing some soil building techniques?

You also need to hire some farm kids or pay for some scholarships to get interns. Some of the problems you described solving over months would have been trivially solved by someone with farm experiences.

You’d really benefit from going to farm auctions, finding one of these, taking it apart, and adapting the mechanisms to your purposes. https://youtu.be/aYv8aDRv998

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Leaving the biomass on the field results in the CO₂ going back into the atmosphere (~80% within 2 years): https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.4141/cjss2010-055#T0002

By contrast, our process retains the nutrients, improves the soil health relative to the baseline of just leaving it, and you get permanent carbon removal.

Yes, we're hiring for great mechanical engineers with experience in these areas ;) Lots to do!

How does removing the biomass improve soil health?

Biochar helps avoid soil compaction and dramatically improves productivity of the soil.

I just did a quick search on impact of biochar on corn yield and the research seems mixed, at best. It seems to have the most impact on poor soil, but little impact on yield in good soil (e.g., the corn belt). A public benefit may be reduction of nitrate leaching—-so applied at scale that could help the Gulf. Water retention can be improved, too; it’d be interesting to see whether there’s impact on yield in drought years.

Read two comments up. Biochar/ash made from the biomass goes into the soil.

So ideally one of your systems would be at the local elevator to make stover dropoff/biochar pickup easy? And then maybe someday combines would have a baler on them? And the biochar could go in a manure spreader for application?

Is there waste heat/syngas coming off the pyrolysis (beyond what's needed for sustaining it)? If so, have you looked into applying that to grain drying?

Yeah, the West Coast Ag School professor in me in flinching at some of this.

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