Biochar helps cut manure emissions

Jan 19, 2023

Researchers find that adding charcoal-like carbon and ash to composting manure can reduce odours as well as methane

Researchers have found that adding a small amount of biochar during the composting process for manure from dairy cattle can cut methane emissions by 84 percent.

Minimizing the greenhouse gases behind climate change is sometimes seen as a problem that requires expensive high-tech solutions, said Gerardo Diaz, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Merced.

“And if this can (instead) be done with materials that are already available, are cheap to make and in a certain way, you’re using waste — that is, the biomass — then, why not? It’s kind of like a no brainer.”

Biochar is the charcoal-like carbon and ash left over when biomasses such as crop residues are heated using pyrolysis under conditions of low oxygen. A study by researchers at the university found that adding as little as six percent biochar to dairy manure resulted in an 84 percent reduction of methane during composting.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids