An introduction to biochar as a soil amendment and making biochar fertilizer. Directed at small, poor farmers in developing areas, it is simple and clear. It provides an excellent introduction to many of the basics of biochar. Warm Heart is a grassroots organization that helps Thai villagers in the remote northern district of Phrao, Chiang Mai Province. We organize community projects that provide access to improved education and basic health services, create jobs and sustainable incomes for the poorest in our community, and restore the environment so it will sustain future generations. For more information visit: www.warmheartworldwide.org

1. Biochar Fertilizer
Why bother? What can it do for you? How do you make it?
Dr. D. Michael Shafer, Director
Warm Heart Foundation
A.Phrao, Chiang Mai, Thailand
www.warmheartworldwide.org
d.michael.shafer@gmail.com

2. What is your most valuable asset?
Your soil

3. Why?
• It feeds you.
• It feeds your family.
• Its health is your health.

4. Why do you use fertilizer?
•To make your soil more healthy
•To feed your soil

5. What’s wrong with your soil?
•Too compacted
•Poor water absorption/poor water retention
•Too acid (very low pH)
•Low organic matter
•Too little soil life – microbes, fungi, worms

6. What nutrients are missing?
Primary macronutrients
• N nitrogen
• P phosphorous
• K potassium
Secondary macronutrients
• Ca Calcium
• S Sulfur
• Mg Magnesium
Micronutrients
• B Boron
• Cl Chlorine
• Mn Manganese
• Fe Iron
• Zn Zinc
• Cu Copper
• Mo Molybdenum
• Ni Nickel
In our fields? All of them!

7. What are you doing to help your soil now?
•Plowing to break up the soil
•Maybe liming
•Irrigating
•Feeding with NPK and urea

8. So what’s wrong with that?
•Plowing creates a deep compaction that roots cannot
penetrate
•You have to lime every season because the lime only
works for a little while and runs off with the rains
•You have to use a huge amount of water because
much of it runs off the hard surface of your soil and
never soaks in – and when it runs off, it takes a lot of
your NKP and urea with it
•NPK is expensive and 50% or more washes away!

9. What else?
•NPK and urea do not supply any of the other required
mineral nutrients
• What if you had to live on a diet of eggs, rice and bananas?
•Minerals are only half of what a plant needs to eat. NPK
and urea can’t supply the other half, organic matter.
•NPK and urea don’t solve any of your other problems
•And didn’t anyone ever tell you that NPK makes the
other problems much, much worse?

10. Why consider using biochar fertilizer?
•It’s free
•You can make it
yourself
•It can solve many of
your problems

11. What can biochar fertilizer do for you?
• Improve soil structure
• Improve water penetration
• Improve water retention
• Increase pH (make your soil less acid)
• Increase soil life (microbes, fungi, worms)
• Increase organic matter (the other half of plants’ diet)

12. Why now? Money
• Thailand just joined ASEAN.
• Thai farmers make less money for every ton of rice or fruit or
vegetables they raise than farmers in any other ASEAN country.
• Why?
Because you spend so
much money on chemicals!

13. Why now? Climate change and you
• What’s happening to the weather? What’s happening to the
rainy season? What’s happening to the rains?
• The weather is getting hotter.
• North Thailand is getting drier.
• The rainy season is getting later and less predictable.
• When rain falls we get big storms and floods that rush off down
the river leaving nothing behind in the ground.

14. Soil structure and water retention
• Our soils and climate change – a bad combination
• Our soils are mostly clay
• They are dense, thick, heavy when wet and hard when dry
• Water just runs off when it rains and when we irrigate
• Is there any way to ensure that more of the rain soaks into our soil
and stays in our soil when it does rain?
• Yes.

15. Biochar, soil structure and water retention
• If you add biochar to your soil, you break up the clay and
make your soil more porous
• Water will penetrate porous soil more easily
• If you add biochar to your soil, the biochar
will absorb lots and lots of water
• Wet biochar holds enough water to add two extra days between
waterings

16. Soil pH and you
pH 7
• pH measures how acid your soil is
• pH runs from 1 (acid) to 14 (alkaline)
• A pH of 7 is neutral and most plants
like soil that is around pH 7
• They grow best at pH 7 because all of
the nutrients in the soil are available
to them.
• Our soils are very acid – pH 4.5 -5.5
• In acid soils the most important
nutrients are not available to plants.
Our soil pH
4.5 – 5.5
Very little N, P, K, S, Ca, Mg

17. Biochar and pH
• Biochar has permanent pH of 8
• Adding biochar will raise your
soil’s pH in the direction of 8
• We will teach you how to make
biochar fertilizer with pH 10!
Your soil Biochar
Direction of improvement

18. Soil life and you
• Healthy soil is alive with
microbes, fungi and worms
• Live soil feeds your plants
• You plants cannot eat N, P
or K; they need soil life to
eat them first –then pee!
• You plants take up bug pee.
• Soil life needs oxygen
• Worms and fungi open the
soil to let the air in!

19. Biochar and soil life
• Scales of minerals that adsorb to the surface of biochar
particles attract many types of soil life.
• Healthy colonies of microbes develop around biochar
particles help to control bad microbes that make plants sick.
• Microbes and fungi attract worms that make holes in the soil
which bring oxygen underground.
• Tiny holes in the surface of biochar
provide comfy condos for soil life. Tiny fungus grows on biochar surface

20. Soil organic matter and you
• Organic matter is dead stuff – plant or animal – that is rotting
• Organic matter provides food and living space for microbes,
fungi and worms.
• The microbes, fungi and worms turn organic matter into food
that your plants can take up.
• Organic matter should be 2 - 10% of your soil and not less
than 1.3%
• Our soil typically contains less than 1.3%, often less than 1%.
Our soil!

21. Biochar and soil organic matter
• Where we live it is hot and things rot quickly because in the
heat the microbes and fungi grow rapidly and eat fast.
• When they eat fast all the extra pee just seeps away with the
nutrients.
• The problem is that when the organic matter is gone, you
must add more to the soil or the soil (and plants) will die. (A
lot of work, as you know!)
• But if we have mixed biochar into the compost and the soil,
all of those nutrients adsorb to the biochar and hang around.

22. Biochar and biochar fertilizer
• Plain biochar is excellent stuff.
• Provided that you age it for at least 3 month before putting it
into your soil, it will do much of this as is.
• But you can do a few things before and after you make your
biochar that will dramatically improve its immediate benefits.
• Here are several very simple tricks that you can use that cost
nothing and require nothing that you do not have right at
hand on your farm.

23. Making biochar fertilizer: pre-treatments
• Before you make your biochar, there are three things you can do to
improve the soil-improving capabilities of your product.
1. You can sprinkle rusty water (just water that you have let some old
iron rust in) over whatever you are going to char.
• This is supposed to improve the electrical change on the surface of biochar to
improve the adsorption of minerals.
2. You can spread on some clay
• Many clays contain trace minerals; by adding clay prior to charring the hope is
that they will bond to the surface of the biochar and be available to
microbes/plants.
3. You can sprinkle on ash (rice straw, corn stalk, wood, whatever)
• Ash has a high pH; again the hope is that it will bond to the surface of the
biochar raising the permanent pH above its natural 8.

24. How to pre-treat biochar feed stock
• When we are charring something chunky like corn cob or wood
chips, we spread it on the ground and sprinkle it with rusty water
from a watering can. We then toss on clay dust and ash while it
is wet and roll it around. When the feed stock is coated, we let it
dry in the sun before charring.
• When we are charring something like rice straw, we mix a slurry
of rusty water, clay and ash and sprinkle in on with a watering
can. It can take several “waterings” to get a good coating.
• This is not a science.

25. Making biochar fertilizer: post-treatments
• What you do after you have made your biochar can also make a big
difference in how your fertilizer works.
1. When possible, we quench our biochar with pig urine; if we cannot
quench with it, we dump as much pig urine on it afterwards as it will
absorb.
• Pig urine is an excellent source of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium (all in
bioavailable forms);
2. We spray our biochar heavily and often with EM.
• EM immediately establishes health microbial communities;
3. We mix it 50:50 with composted cow manure, or 40:40:20 with
composted manure and the best clay/dirt we can find.
• The cow manure adds further microbes and an organic material source;
• The clay/soil starts the adsorption process.
• High quality compost works well, too. Or both manure and compost.

26. How to post-treat biochar feed stock
• If you need just a bit of fertilizer, use a couple of buckets and a hoe.
• If you have a farm, here are a few suggestions:
• If you are using corn cob:
• Make sure to have a half a 200 l. drum or a lined pit or whatever filled with
pig urine to quench in. The hot biochar in the urine apparently improves the
quality and it’s a lot less stinky than bucketing the urine on afterwards.
• If you have a truck or kwai lek or tractor, use it to crush the biochar. You want
the char in pieces about the size of corn kernels.
• For all types of biochar, the easiest way to mix your fertilizer is to use
a 200 l. drum with a door in the side. Put all of the ingredients in the
drum, shut the door and roll it down hill for 25 meters.
• EM your fertilizer any time you are using your 20 l. backpack sprayer
to EM anything else. We EM at least once a week.

27. Adding ingredients
Rolling downhill
On mixer/bagger
Side door open
Adjusting bag
Bagging fertilizer
Gravity is your friend

28. So what can biochar fertilizer do for you?
• Biochar is a simple way to enrich your soil.
• In the short-term, but increasingly over the long-term, it will
improve your yields.
• It will improve your soil in every way and will help to prepare
you for the risks of climate change.
• Used properly and regularly, biochar can help you:
• Manage your water needs better;
• Reduce your costs; and
• Improve your yields and income.

29. It’s not magic – but it’s better than anything else
you have at hand!
Biochar is not magic.
• Biochar takes work
But biochar will pay you for your work.
• Biochar takes work
But biochar will make you and
your family healthier.
• Biochar takes work
But biochar will ensure that your land will remain productive
into the future.

30. This PowerPoint is brought to you by Warm Heart Publications.
Warm Heart is a grassroots community development organization serving the
world’s 3 billion poorest people – rural small farmers.
In addition to publications such as this one for developed world audiences, Warm
Heart Publications’ Educational Program publishes a wide range of simple but
accurate materials for small, rural farmers. This program begins from the
assumption that rural people are interested in the big issues affecting their lives
and want to understand them.
Publications in the Warm Heart Educational Program for Small Farmers cover
issues as diverse as the basics of soil health and plant nutrition to mitigating the
consequences of climate change and how biochar works.
Biochar Fertilizer: Why bother? What can it do
for you? How do you make it?

31. Warm Heart Publications
Contact
Dr. D. Michael Shafer
d.Michael.shafer@gmail.com
Warm Heart Worldwide, Inc.
434 Cedar Avenue
Highland Park, NJ 08904
Warm Heart Foundation
61 M.8 T.Maepang A.Phrao 50190
Chiang Mai, Thailand

32. Warm Heart Publications
To learn more about Warm Heart, please visit:
www.warmheartworldwide.org
This training brought to you as part of “A Breath of Fresh Air” funded by the United
States Department of State