Biochar Demonstration

Join Maynard Kaufman and Karl Kaufman at Maynard’s farm in Bangor, Michigan for a low-tech biochar production demonstration.

Biochar is charcoal from biomass, which effectively sequesters carbon for hundreds to thousands of years. We will utilize the Hawaiian pit pyrolysis technique popularized by Josiah Hunt.

Local wood will be converted to char, and participants will take a bag of biochar home to experiment with.

Biochar has been held up as part of a sustainable solution to climate change, by sequestering carbon and preventing its return to the atmosphere as greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Biochar has also been documented to improve soil fertility by increasing resident soil carbon and resultant improvement in microbiological populations, as well as improving moisture and nutrient retention. The productive deep prairie soils of the Midwest, and the Terra Preta soils in the Amazon are a result of char.

For more information, see the flyer.