Our kiln in action at Sacred Earth earlier this year
Biochar has an important future – it is a solution (one of many) to the challenges of these times. At Sacred Earth our Biochar team has been making progress creating our first batch of products, despite the fact that the project is currently unfunded. So far this year the team have completed five successful char burns and even hired out our kiln to Carbon Gold for a training day.
Our process of coppicing Goat Willow, a pioneer species of tree, and using the kiln to turn the wood into a high grade char product is proving to be highly effective. With some extra financial support we’ll be receiving later this year through the Just Growth funding programme, we will be turning this char into an high value product, not only a powerful agent to increase soil fertility but also an effective way of sequestering carbon in the ground.
Our team has also been working diligently to prepare our systems design and manufacturing process through the implementation of a new mixed grade compost system and construction of additional wood storage sheds out of recycled materials and pallets.
We have also laboured to cut up a huge pile of salvaged hard woods for our kiln fuel and additional barbeque char. Hardwood char is not suitable for use as Biochar but if we can establish a model which will enable us to decrease our production costs we can make more hardwood barbeque char for sale locally, a sustainable, local alternative to the cheap barbeque charcoal on sale in UK garages, 90% of which is produced at the expense of mass deforestation in South America and South East Asia, a process which destroys ecosystems and comes with a massive carbon footprint, a huge cost which is not reflected in the price consumers in the UK pay when we light our summer barbeques.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thanks all our supporters, investors and donors. We aim to make a big impact with our Earth Elixirs range of carbonised products over the next five years. You have played an instrumental role in the early chapters of this story.
Donations are warmly accepted through our LocalGiving.com Biochar project page. With each £250 we raise we do a burn for the Earth: the char we produce from that burn are put back into the ground to act as a carbon sink and to increase soil and nutrient fertility in that location.
