March 22, 2024

Caroline Cronin

8th Grade

Frost Middle School

Climate change has been gradually affecting our planet since the 1950s. For the past 50 years, the Earth has warmed by 0.13℃  (1/4 of a degree Fahrenheit). While this may not seem like a lot, the impacts are detrimental and continue to worsen as more time passes. Scientists predicted that in the next twenty years, our planet will warm up 1 ⁄ 3 of a degree Fahrenheit. While climate change affects many things, its effects on agriculture are quite damaging. With the increase in heavy rains, nutrients in the soil are rapidly being expended. If crops can not be grown, then supply cannot keep up with demand, and the economy will as a result of this catastrophe. 

However, a groundbreaking discovery in the 1990’s changed everything. A scientist named Johannes Lehmann was studying in the Amazon, looking to aid the restoration of soils. Many before him found the fertile “terra preta” (meaning black earth in Portuguese) held a lot of charcoal from ancient civilizations. Lehmann conducted an experiment in the year 2000, in which he added charcoal to corrupted soil from the Amazon. The results showed a significant increase in the soil’s fertility. Today, Lehmann works with a material called biochar, which is what changed society’s approach to agriculture. 

Biochar is produced from biomass waste, similar to charcoal. It’s created by a process called pyrolysis, in which a thermo-chemical conversion occurs changing dry materials into bio-oil, syngas, and biochar. Just like snow, the biochars do not all have the same performance or quality. This depends mostly on the source of biomass, the temperature of pyrolysis, and the size. Over the past few years, studies conducted on biochar have shown that it is beneficial to the environment in aiding soil nutrition and helping to decrease the effects of climate change. It slows down the rate of carbon decomposition by one or two orders of magnitude (on a scale of centuries/millennia). Biochar is extremely useful for composting, and because it is an organic material, it lasts for thousands of years once it is put into the ground. Finally, it retains about 50% of carbon in the original biomass. While these may be smaller statistics, their impacts add up and become significant. 

While we still have much more work to do in addressing climate change, biochar is one more baby step towards a sustainable future. It is great for aiding healthy growth of crops in the agriculture field, it reduces greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and it is good for soil in general, helping it have more nutrients and water retention. Biochar is an eco-friendly solution to reverse some effects of climate change and an excellent way for farmers to keep up with supply and demand which, in turn, will also help the economy.