By Michael Shulman
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is awarding American Farmland Trust (AFT) nearly $5 million over five years through its Conservation Innovation Grants On-Farm Trials program to help expand AFT’s national network into a coordinated Soil Health Management Systems (SHMS) Network. Working with 35 trial host farms across 14 states in five regions, and more than 20 partners, the project will demonstrate and evaluate biochar application and its performance when integrated with complementary soil health practices on working farms. Through farmer-led trials, technical and financial assistance, decision-support tools, and peer networks, the project will help farmers and ranchers adopt systems that fit their operations, while generating regionally relevant soil, water, economic, and social data.
"Biochar has the potential to build more resilient agroecosystems by improving soil health, stabilizing and increasing yield and profitability, increasing beneficial microbial communities, improving soil water availability, and providing an efficient means to immediately improve degraded soils, particularly in high disturbance and water-limited systems," said AFT Climate and Soil Health Director and Principal Investigator Dr. Bianca Moebius-Clune. "And when low-value biomass, like forest debris, is turned into biochar, that can also reduce wildfire risk for communities while benefiting both ecosystems and farm resilience. But farmers and ranchers want to see how new practices perform on farms like theirs before they invest in significant change."
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