What is Biochar Fertilizer?

Biochar has been ballyhoo as a miracle crop booster and a key tool to combat global warming by veteran climatologist James Lovelock. But what exactly is it? Biochar is actually just a new-fangled name for a very traditional product - charcoal. It is also composed in a very similar way. Plant element such as wood, farming waste or even garden waste is heated without oxygen so the chemical composition changes without releasing carbon. This process has been carried out for millennia, including by tribes and civilizations in the Amazon rainforest. The classic technique for making charcoal is to dig a pit or trench in the earth, begin burning whatever plant matter is to hand and then cover the fire with earth to allow it to blaze rather than burning up all the fuel completely. The conclusion is a carbon-rich, dry solid which we would all recognize as charcoal. Nowadays biochar is made using pyrolizer - a heating tank which allows better control of temperature. It also grants the biochar manufacturer to harvest the other products in the manufacturing process. One is a brown, abide substance which can be used as a herbicide, and the other is a flammable gas which actually produces three to nine times the amount of efficiency it takes to make biochar in the first place.

So what is the distinction between charcoal and biochar?

Chemically speaking, not very much. The real divergence is in how it is used. Generally, charcoal is burned for fuel, but this releases a lot of carbon, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. All along their life cycles, plants breathe in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so they store massive amounts of carbon within their structures. When they expire they either decompose or are burned, and this releases the carbon back into the atmosphere again. The good thing related to biochar is that it can capture that carbon for up to 10,000 years. The action produces a very stable substance which doesn't decompose, even when put back into the earth. This aid all the carbon a plant takes out of the atmosphere stays out of the atmosphere. This means biochar can be used to permanently capture carbon and can be burned to produce carbon sinks - large deposits of carbon below the ground. Dissimilar carbon-dioxide biochar also doesn't need so much oxygen to remain stable, so instead of trying to capture carbon-dioxide and also losing oxygen from the atmosphere, only carbon is taken. Investigation has shown that biochar can be a very useful additive to soil, increasing crop yields, adding nutrients and making soil less acidic.

Nothing is sure yet quite how biochar makes crops grow better, and although adding the substance makes crops grow better to a point if too much is added it makes no difference or can have a detrimental effect. It is exceptionally good for over-farmed, weathered soils with few nutrients and low potassium levels. Plants that love potash and more alkaline soils are likely to respond best to added biochar. The manufacture and use of biochar fertilizer are very new fields, so if you want to try and make and use it yourself you will need to experiment to find out what works best.