Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 14 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
PLOWBOY: Does your theory about cool black and warm white have any application beyond those you've just mentioned involving animals and people?
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HAY: Yes. An especially good example can be seen on Lanzarote, the northernmost of the Canary Islands. Volcanoes there around 1730 covered large parts of the highland inches deep with black cinders. Yet, despite the fact that the land receives only six inches of rain a year, it grows watermelons, tomatoes, grapes, potatoes, and other crops. Why? There isn't an agriculturalist in the United States that knows how to do that.
My theory about cool black provides, I think, most of the answer. The sunlight failing on the black surface of the cinders is immediately turned to heat which is radiated right back into the atmosphere. And the thick layer of cinders between that surface and the ground underneath acts as insulation which keeps the earth cool. This allows the soil to retain and make maximum use of the little rainfall it receives.
In addition to that, the trade winds constantly blow moist air across the island and a little of that moisture condenses on those cinders every night when they get cold under the nocturnal sky. And that condensed moisture trickles down through the cinders and recharges the soil below every morning.
PLOWBOY: That sounds plausible.
HAY: Yes. Well we could use this idea ourselves in some farming regions ... but, when I discussed it with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the people I talked to were extremely skeptical at first. They'd been trained, you see, to avoid black at all times and they couldn't believe that black could do what I said it would do.
Then I found that the idea got a completely different reception when I talked to some agricultural people in Greece. "But of course!" they said. "You've just explained what happens when we burn Thessaly."
And I said, "Well, I don't know anything about burning Thessaly." So they told me.
It seems that for 2,000 years the peasants in the Thessaly region of Greece have been burning off their fields every year. And for the last few decades, the agriculturalists have been trying to get them to stop.
First the agriculturalists said that the burning would kill the bacteria in the soil. But that was disproved. Then they said it was wrong because it destroyed nitrogen that the soil needed. But someone proved that it actually took more nitrogen to compost the unburned straw in the soil than the straw contained in the first place. So then the agriculturalists said that the straw shouldn't be burned because it was needed to open up and loosen and aerate the soil. But 20 years of tests proved that wrong also. And then they said that the straw was necessary to prevent erosion. But tests showed that it was really the stubble-which was left after the burning anyway that stopped the erosion.
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