This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Beauregard Burgess and three friends decided to start a hog and poultry farm in 2015, they chose an odd location: 20 acres of swampy land on the east side of Homer, Alaska, a coastal hamlet south of Anchorage. The land, logged years ago, was in an industrial part of town, and its soil was in poor health. That anemia was part of the appeal for Burgess and his colleagues, who wanted to raise livestock in a way that would add nutrients and beneficial microbes to the ground, restore the local ecosystem, and improve the local food scene.
Today, Blood, Sweat, and Food Farms is something of an oasis. Its lush pastures are just down the road from auto shops, lots crowded with heavy equipment and heaps of gravel. Burgess and his partners have turned the lot’s acidic, water-logged earth into a rich humus, and they’ve done so in an organic, regenerative way — that is, without syntheticchemicals. Such an achievement has involved a number of innovations and tactics, from building bioswales that limit flooding to spreading nutrient-rich compost across fields. But one tool in particular stands out: biochar — a jet-black substance made by roasting plant matter, like wood, in an oxygen-deprived environment.
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The glorified charcoal is rare on American farms, yet it has become a focal point in the movement to turn agriculture into a climate solution. Biochar can lock up planet-warming carbon for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, and unlike other, higher-tech technologies that suck carbon out of the air, it’s relatively straightforward and accessible.
“Look at the playing field. What else is out there that’s commercially viable right now?” said Kathleen Draper, board chair at the International Biochar Initiative. “The reality is: It’s a shovel-ready technology.”
As a result, Microsoft, JPMorgan hase, Shopify, and other corporations trying to burnish their image as climate-conscious are paying biochar producers millions of dollars so that they can claim credit for the carbon that’s locked up in the soot and not in the atmosphere heating the Earth. Biochar now accounts for the vast majority of the carbon dioxide that has supposedly been removed from the air after being purchased by companies seeking to offset their planet-warming emissions, according to cdr.fyi, a website that tracks carbon removal data. Still, it could be years before biochar fulfils its promise, if it ever does; only a small fraction of the amount that would meaningfully chip away at global emissions is currently being produced. And there’s no easy answer for how to scale it up.
Farmers have used charred plant matter for millennia to improve soils. In the Amazon rainforest, known for its nutrient-poor dirt, archeologists have dug up pockets of unusually dark, fecund earth, commonly referred to as terra preta Those soils likely were made fertile thanks to intentional burning and the proliferation of a biochar-like substance thousands of years ago. The porous, spongelike material can act like a steroid for soil. It gives dirt structure, which helps bacteria and fungi latch onto it and make nutrients available for plants. And when it rains, biochar keeps soil from shedding off fields.
