As we begin another new year, it feels like a good time to reflect on the history of BiocharBiochar is a carbon-rich material created from biomass decomposition in low-oxygen conditions. It has important applications in environmental remediation, soil improvement, agriculture, carbon sequestration, energy storage, and sustainable materials, promoting efficiency and reducing waste in various contexts while addressing climate change challenges. More Today and also share some exciting changes planned for 2026.

The History of Biochar Today

I’ve never publicly shared details about Biochar Today’s journey or strategy. But I think a brief account of where we came from will help frame what’s next.

Biochar Today began in 2020 as a Twitter account. My father, Don Harfield, had just invited me to join Charterra’s board as a go-to-market advisor. I knew nothing about biochar. As a service to myself, I built a simple automation that shared news on Twitter (and LinkedIn) relevant to the biochar industry. The account was not actively monitored, and the feed was not particularly curated. Given the nascent nature of the industry, the feed included some industry news, but most stories were about the growing body of scientific research published in academic journals.

At the end of 2023, I looked at the account and found two things: (1) they had accumulated sizable audiences, which signaled that the information being shared was valuable to a large community outside of myself; and (2) the most common piece of feedback on posts tended to fall along the lines of the following:

This is all great content. And I love science. But I’m a practitioner and am having a tough time making sense of some of the material as shared directly by researchers. Can you help to make it more ‘human readable’?

Biochartoday.com launched on January 1, 2024, in direct response to this feedback. This marked the second phase of Biochar Today’s development, from a social media account to a blog. It represented a strategic shift from aggregation to curation, and from resharing to summarization.

ChatGPT was just starting to make major headlines, and so I leaned heavily on large language models to generate both stories and images. I’ve always been transparent about our use of AI. I viewed Biochar Today more as a public service than as a business. I still considered myself a novice, though, and so hid my personal association with the website. I wanted it to be strictly about the content and the community. It wasn’t about me. I had to giggle when I saw online speculations about who ran the site and how it worked.

Toward the end of 2024, however, a couple of really cool things started to happen:

1. We got our first sponsors. Offstream and Northeastern Biochar Solutions believed in the vision and joined as founding partners.
2. We began receiving guest blog posts. Readers of Biochar Today who valued the content began sharing their own original work and asked if it might be a good fit for publication.

Of the inquiries I received, the most notable were from Dr. Shanthi Prabha. An excellent researcher and passionate educator, she shared work from her and her students on the use of biochar to support wetlands, to address issues related to invasive species, and for targeted cancer treatment.

Toward the end of 2024, Shanthi and I discussed the possibility of her joining Biochar Today as Science Editor. It was a short conversation. Shanthi was in. And Biochar Today was ready to enter its third phase, transitioning from a news summarization service to a digital news publication for the biochar industry.

Looking back at 2025

In 2025, we placed significant emphasis on original content and reduced our reliance on generative AI.

(We’ve actually learned a lot over the past year about how to use this exciting new technology…and where NOT to use it. It remains an essential tool in our toolbox, but our use has become more conservative over time. Where we do use it, we employ human-in-the-loop editorial procedures to ensure accuracy and mitigate the risk of hallucination.)

Bridging the Divide between Research and Practice

In her capacity as Science Editor, Dr. Prabha launched several columns designed to support the scientific community (with a particular emphasis on early-stage researchers) and to bridge the divide between research and practitioner communities:

• Spill the Char is a weekly series that explores fundamental scientific and technical concepts for the uninitiated.
• Expert Profiles are interviews with established leaders and emerging researchers on their backgrounds, motivations, work, and trajectories. These have been tremendously popular. In fact, the most-read post of 2025 was an interview with Sriram Raghavendran and his work with India’s Biochar Centre of Excellence at Kanha Shanti Vanam. My favorite moment in this series, however, comes from the very first post in this series, an interview with Kathleen Draper in which Shanthi asked if Kathleen would write a poem. She did!
• Shanthi’s “Debunking Biochar Myths” eBook series presents five volumes that brilliantly educate readers about biochar by addressing what it is not.

In addition to the above, Shanthi regularly writes long-form blog posts on a wide range of timely topics and invites and edits pieces from a growing number of third-party contributors.

The Biochar Show

Our first foray into podcasting was “This Week in Biochar,” an AI-generated wrap-up of top stories from the prior week. While the podcast quickly grew to 1,500-2,500 downloads per week and, for a time, ranked as the 8th most-listened-to news podcast in Bulgaria (go figure!), it was intended as an experiment and a stopgap as we looked for a real-life human host.

We found her.

Meghan K. Lees is an actress passionate about sustainability. We launched The Biochar Show at the end of February (Please subscribe!) and quickly grew our listening audience. Meghan brought professionalism and an inquisitive mind to the podcast. She was not from the biochar industry, which was a great strength as it allowed her, in those early episodes, to return to first principles and guide guests to overcome the ‘curse of knowledge’ (i.e., that the more you tend to know about a subject, the more difficult it becomes for you to communicate that knowledge to non-specialists).

After 12 episodes, Meghan left the podcast to pursue another great opportunity. I’m personally grateful to Meghan for all she did, not just to produce high-quality podcasts (something that the industry desperately needed), but also for establishing processes and ways of working that are an important part of her legacy.

The show entered a brief hiatus before returning with John Webster at the helm. John is well-known within the biochar community. John runs Go Biochar, a leading source for bulk biochar sales & service, biochar technical consulting, field demonstrations, and product development across agriculture, forestry, fuels, and carbon markets. He serves as Director of Development at BiocharOnSite, and was formerly the Director of Communications at the US Biochar Initiative.

As a result of John’s passion, extensive network, and deep expertise, the show has become incredibly rich. The risk of having an industry veteran host a show like this is that it becomes too arcane, too in-group. However, John’s passion as an evangelist has enabled him to strike an outstanding balance: going deep in longer-form interviews without sacrificing broad relevance and applicability.

Bag of Doorknobs

In addition to the work done by Shanthi, Meghan, and John, we tried lots of other things as well:

• We launched a weekly newsletter that now reaches more than 1,000 people.
• We attended and covered the 2025 North American Biochar Conference
• We completed market research for one company interested in understanding the feasibility of a proposed initiative, and recommended a marketing plan to mitigate risk in their go-to-market strategy (My personal background as a social scientist and market researcher for Fortune 500 companies brought unique and valuable insights to the exercise)
• We doubled down on our members-only content, with ebooks, deep dive industry briefings, and long-form research blogs

I would be remiss not to thank Ralph Green, who joined us briefly as Business Editor before accepting an exciting position with a global analyst firm. While at Bochar Today, Ralph helped us refine our processes and covered several UK-based events. He wrote a blog series documenting his journey into backyard biochar, and another examining biochar through an international lens. He also completed a really cool project that I’m not going to talk about here…but stay tuned 😉

What’s Changing in 2026?

Of everything we did in 2025, I am most proud of the work we did behind the scenes. The small-but-mighty team spent months discussing and refining our understanding of what Biochar Today is and how we can best support the large, growing, and international community that has come to rely on our coverage. The result was a clear mission, vision, and set of values that we have published to our About Us page, but that I’ll repeat here:

MISSION

To promote innovation in the production and use of biocarbon through sound science, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and industry accountability.

VISION

To realize a future where biochar is the gold standard for carbon-negative development, improving social well-being, enhancing agriculture, and creating circular economies in industrial systems.

VALUES

1. Open Science. Accelerating discovery, enhancing reproducibility, and democratizing knowledge access while fostering public trust. (This is why we make a point of only sharing and promoting open access research)
2. Accountability. Ensure trust, drive integrity, and uphold high, verifiable standards for sustainable biocarbon development and use.
3. Multidisciplinarity. Integrating perspectives to unlock holistic solutions for complex environmental and market challenges.
4. Innovation. Supporting startups and early-stage researchers to transform ideas into disruptive technology and market-ready solutions.

Rooted in these values, 2026 will see two major changes

• No More Members-Only Content. In 2025, we structured our content strategy so that news summaries and short-form content were openly available, while longer-form original content was available only to paid subscribers. In 2026, as a reflection of our commitment to open science, accountability, and innovation, we will discontinue that distinction. Going forward, everything we create will be available to all. Of course, the only way this works is through the generous support of partners who believe in our vision, are passionate about growing the industry, and see the business value of getting out in front of 300,000 eyeballs. For current subscribers of Biochar Today: Thank you! In the next few days, you should see your membership go away, and any January payments refunded. In place of memberships, we will add a donation option for individuals who wish to support us on a voluntary basis.
• Anyone can write for Biochar Today. Another aspect of our 2025 content strategy was that anyone with a commercial interest who wanted to publish a guest post on Biochar Today would need to be a sponsor (researchers, non-profits, and hobbyists could publish without payment as long as they complied with our editorial guidelines). In 2026, anyone, regardless of affiliation, may submit content for publication. Going forward, as long as authors follow our guidelines and provide information and perspectives of value to our readers, we’ll publish contributions regardless of their source. Anyone interested in having their ideas featured on Biochar Today is encouraged to contact us at hello@biochartoday.com.

To oversee the execution and continued evolution of our content strategy, I’m very pleased to announce that Dr. Shanthi Prabha is being promoted to Managing Editor of Biochar Today. In her role as science editor, Shanthi played a pivotal role in expanding our audience and reach, which doubled in 2025 compared to 2024. Under her general management, we expect to see our audience double again in 2026.

The changes we are making in 2026 may not seem particularly prudent from a commercial standpoint. But we take our values very seriously. We’re committed to doing good, but we also understand that our ability to continue this vital work will require partnerships with industry. Some of you will recall that we piloted 3rd party ads for about a month in 2025. While this did generate revenue, the experience for the reader was, well, crappy. We don’t really want to do that again. But this further underscores the importance of partners if we are going to maintain and grow our industry impact

I’d like to close out this blog post with a thank you and an ask.

I am exceedingly grateful to you, the reader. Your engagement and own personal words of appreciation (shared on social media and in private emails) are the driving force behind everything we do. I’m also incredibly grateful to our current partners, which include AbTech Industries, BioFlux, Biomass Energy Techniques, Clean Earth Innovations, Mangrove Systems, Northeastern Biochar Solutions, Offstream, Ricardo, Titan Clean Energy Products, Timber Products Inspection, and others, without whom our work would not be possible.

My humble ask, dear reader, is that you help us to grow and serve you even better in 2026. How can you support our work? Here are a few ideas:

1. Subscribe to The Biochar Show on YouTube. This costs nothing but goes a long way toward increasing our reach, visibility, and impact. Click HERE to subscribe now.
2. Send us your ideas. We want to hear from you! Whether you are a student, an established researcher, an industry professional, or a backyard enthusiast, we’d love to share your story. Check out our editorial guidelines and send your piece to hello@biochartoday.com. If you follow the guidelines and have an idea worth sharing, we’d love to publish it.
3. Partner with us. We’re actively seeking partners who share our values, support our vision, and recognize the commercial value of positioning their brand in front of our large, rapidly growing audience. Whether you are a startup or a large enterprise, we’d love to talk with you about your goals and put together a package that fits your budget. Interested? Let’s talk! Please email us at hello@biochartoday.com.