Biochar Factsheet: Consider Biochar Benefits for Your Land

Making biochar is a great forest management tool. 

Diseased or insect infected trees can be cut and burned on site to make biochar and also control insects and disease transfer to healthy trees. 

Clearing brush on your land reduces wild fire fuels, and provides open landscape wildlife habitat for game species like sharp tailed grouse and woodcock and countless song birds and animals. 

Make it at home use it at home. Biochar is best mixed with compost of livestock bedding to fill all those wood pore spaces with nutrients, microbes, bacteria, and minerals that will super charge the biochar and make your soils more healthy. 

Harness the power of biochar by adding it to your compost and applying the mix to your garden, potting soil, lawn, woods or fields. Anywhere your soil needs help. 

Biochar fixes carbon by taking it out of the atmosphere and putting it into soil. We can let trees and plants do the work of pulling carbon from the atmosphere, lock that carbon up in a stable form as biochar, and avoid plant decay and carbon release. When we harvest biomass waste, convert it to biochar, and apply it to soil - we extend carbon storage. We can take CO2 from the air, absorbed by trees and plants, and use biomass waste products to enrich our soils and store carbon indefinitely. 

For more information, a complete Landowner Guide to Biochar, how to videos, and information on how to rent the SWCD Oregon biochar kilns to make some supercharged soil amendments from your waste brush visit: 

https://carltonswcd.org/biochar-kilns

The information in this guide was originally developed by the Carlton SWCD with support from an RSDP Grant and as part of the project “Biomass to Biochar for Landscape Health in Carlton County”. Special thanks to University of Minnesota Extension. March 2023. Layout and design for this factsheet provided by Dovetail Partners in collaboration with Beruck Studios.