What is Biochar

What is Biochar

Biochar is charcoal suitable for soil, it’s carbon. It’s basically been put down by nature for about half a billion years from when fires occur. It leaves that charred wood behind. Biochar is the management system of soil. Biochar is not a fertilizer. It’s an amendment, basically. It’s just a piece of wood that’s been fully carbonized so that there’s no organic material left in what the original wood material was.

So basically, we’re taking wood material, and creating fully carbonized charcoal out of it. And that is biochar. Its main functions are that it manages your water by holding seven times its weight in water in the soil, the roots attached to the little granules of the biochar. And now the root systems have this incredible reservoir of water in case of a drought. Secondly, biochar holds the nutrients that are in your soil, both the ones you add and the ones that are created by microbiology.

When you’re watering your garden or it’s raining, normally those nutrients wash downstream, the biochar reduces that runoff of your nutrients by up to 80%. So it cuts down on the need for extra fertilizers in your soil. The next thing is, if you look under a microscope at biochar you will see lots of porous nooks and crannies which are luxury condos for all microbiology allowing them to proliferate in your soil.

When the roots are attached to the biochar and the microbiology moves into the biochar, it creates much more fertile soil. So it expands microbiology by providing a wonderful luxury condo, a safe home environment for microbiology, whereas soil without does hardly that.

The other thing about biochar is that carbon-negative three to one simply put for every pound of biochar you put into the ground, you have sequestered three pounds of carbon gasses from going into the atmosphere. The next really cool point about biochar is that it is fixed carbon, meaning that it is basically a permanent amendment. Once you put it into your soil, it’s gonna be there for centuries continually doing your job when we’re creating a living soil, which is regenerative, meaning it gets better every year.

Biochar is the key component that does that. So biochar is permanent. Once you put it in doesn’t mean you can’t add more as you go along, you certainly can. And we encourage that. The more you build up, the more water savings, the more nutrient savings, and higher yields and higher quality.

Biochar is a fixed carbon and it has a lifespan of many centuries so it is a capital investment in your soil as opposed to a yearly expenditure.